Cleveland Browns Remain Optimistic After A Premature End To A Choppy Season
Here is one way to look at the Cleveland Browns’ 2023 season: they had nearly as many quarterbacks as losses.
Is that good or bad?
Hard to say, but when it comes to the Browns, that’s a statistic that should not surprise anyone, because these are the Browns, for whom the norm is not necessarily the norm for everyone else.
Super Bowls, for example.
Only four NFL teams have never played in the Super Bowl. The Browns are one of them. The others are the Detroit Lions, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Houston Texans. The Lions are still alive in this year’s tournament, so it’s possible that, at the start of next season, only three teams will have never played in the Super Bowl.
The Browns would be one of them.
Teams that reach the Super Bowl tend to have stability at the quarterback position. That’s not the Browns. As noted above, in 2023 the Browns had nearly as many quarterbacks as losses.
They had five quarterbacks and seven losses. Given their record of 11-7, that’s a pretty good wins-to-quarterbacks ratio. Not ideal, but, everything considered, not awful.
Cleveland also had more than its share of injuries in 2023. The Browns played some games with virtually their entire offensive line on the injured list. There was no position group on either side of the ball that was not negatively affected by injuries – including placekicker, Dustin Hopkins, who, believe it or not, was arguably the team’s most valuable player.
Hopkins missed the Browns’ last three games after straining his hamstring while chasing an opposing kick-returner down the field. Nick Chubb, arguably the best running back in the league, was lost for the season halfway through the second game of the season, due to season-ending knee surgery.
“The thing I’m most proud about this team,” said Browns Executive Vice President of Football Operations and General Manager Andrew Berry, in his state-of-the-team address to reporters this week, “is all the adversity they overcame this year, turning challenges into opportunities.”
For that, Berry gave credit to head coach Kevin Stefanski, who appears to be a strong candidate to be named the NFL’s Coach of the Year for the second time in his four years as coach of the Browns.
“The way he was able to lead and manage through adversity this year was absolutely phenomenal,” said Berry. “We have a smart, adaptable, emotionally intelligent leader. The crazy part is he’s not even close to his ceiling.”
The biggest challenge for Stefanski started with the quarterback carousel, triggered by injuries to starter Deshaun Watson, who only played in five games, and one quarter of a sixth. The other four quarterbacks were rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson, P.J. Walker, Jeff Driskel, and veteran Joe Flacco, who became a Cleveland folk hero late in the season after the Browns signed him as a free agent.
With Flacco at quarterback, the Browns won four games in a row to reach the postseason for the first time since 2020.
“He played winning football for us, and did a great job of coming in and playing at a really high level,” Berry said. “I was really pleased with Joe on the field and with who he was as a teammate.”
Flacco played so well, was such a leader, and was so popular with the fans and his teammates that Berry did not discount the possibility of bringing Flacco back next season as a backup to Watson.
“I believe backup quarterback is a top 30 position on the roster,” Berry said. “We absolutely would love to have Joe back, but it depends. There are constraints, but I would have no problem having Joe back.”
The importance of having an experienced, veteran quarterback behind Watson cannot be understated, given the fact that Watson has had trouble staying on the field. Since being traded to the Browns by Houston in 2022 Watson, due to injuries – a season-ending shoulder injury this season – and suspensions, has only appeared in 11 of the Browns’ 35 games.
“We’d like to have him on the field more than he’s been. He’s very talented and very hard working,” Berry said.
So is the Browns’ highly-touted defense, which was considered the best in the league for much of the 2023 season, but was shredded by Houston rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud in Cleveland’s 45-14 blowout loss to the Texans in Houston, in the wildcard game.
That loss further exposed a troubling trend involving the Browns’ defense: in home games the Browns’ defense held opponents to an average of 13 points per game. But in road games Cleveland’s defense gave up an average of over 31 points per game, including 45 points in the wildcard loss to Houston.
“We picked a bad day and a bad time to play a good team and a good quarterback,” said Berry of the season-ending loss to Houston. “We made a lot of errors that up to that point we hadn’t made. I’m not over-reacting to one game. I’m going off a body of work.”
Stefanski’s body of work was the one constant in the Browns’ season.
“He has grown and evolved as a coach and leader over these four years,” Berry said. “Kevin is the best of us on a human level. That authenticity really allows him to be an exceptional leader for our organization.”
