Newsletter: The Schedule Looming, and Jim Schwartz Evidence
Realization the schedule is just now hitting the gauntlet and the defense’s inexplicable struggle.
Monday has arrived and for now eight weeks that means we are talking about what went wrong in a Browns loss. The cycle is getting old and it cuts especially deep when it was a topic we didn’t think we would be covering this year in any shape or form. But I guess that cuts to our main point here. What has gone so wrong that the Browns went from a division contender to being among the worst teams in the league in just 10 football games. This is catastrophic on so many level because you can’t really lean into the injuries the way you could last year — which they overcame — and you don’t have any other unexpected and baked-in excuses. It’s just a failure on the deepest of levels.
As we then try to decipher where the team goes for the rest of the season, time spent trying to evaluate things like effort and scheme, there is a forgotten element. The 2024 Browns have yet to even face the most brutal stretch of their season. They missed the window on so many games that had winnable odds in their favor and now go into the fold that invites the following situation.
This stretch includes playing two division leaders, two Thursday night games, and a combined record of 46-22 and those two “bad” teams include the Dolphins (surging with Tua Tagovailoa back) and the Bengals who have been the league’s worst in the luck category of one-score games. This is brutal. Current Vegas odds have the Browns win total at 3.5 and I am unsure where those other two wins will be coming from.
You can have down seasons in the NFL, hell the Browns had two in 2021 and 2022 where they went 8-9 and 7-10, but the standard is different now and some 3-14 season is hard to see as something the people leading the franchise just get to come back from unscathed. I have no clue how the players respond to that decision with this outcome. So much to be decided among rough times that are coming. This won’t be fun.
One of the main issues I have with the Browns performance in 2024 has been a total failure of evolution on the defensive side of the ball. It makes next to zero sense given the talent they have over there. Their over-aggressive and often carless approach to the mental side of the game is driving me into insanity when I watch others across the league adapt and evolve to make things challenging for opposing offenses.
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