Power Ranking The Browns At The Bye

A look back at a, uh, tumultuous first half of the 2024 season.

(Photo - Cleveland Browns)

If there’s one thing to say about the Browns 2024 season, it’s that it’s mercifully at the bye week. For one Sunday smack dab in the peak of fall, we do not have to endure Browns football. We can jump into a pile of leaves like the fully grown adults we are. We can order a pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks on the mobile app under a fake name. We can sit and contemplate the nature of life, and how somewhere out there in another galaxy, there are beings who have never had to experience football, or the Browns, or Danny Shelton.

But since we do not exist in that galaxy, nor have the technology to transport us there (yet!!!!), we must take the bye week to reflect. And reflect we will. Here are four people, places and things from the first half of the Browns season, ranked by importance, or sadness, or both.

4. Defensive Celebrations

When Jim Schwartz joined the Browns as defensive coordinator in 2023, he immediately infused a culture of swagger into his players. He encouraged them to celebrate their wins, because life is too short not to mimic sheathing a sword after a pass breakup. As a general principle, I am pro playing with emotion. Professional NFL players put their bodies through an ungodly amount of punishment just to play one single, solitary game a week, and deserve to unleash that pent up energy or rage or issues with their mother that they’ve been talking about in therapy. Unfortunately, the pendulum has swung too far the opposite way this season.

When you’re 2-7 and in the midst of a season from hell, Greg Newsome dancing after his man drops a pass by his own volition doesn’t hit the same. Neither does the entire defense breaking out a choreographed dance after a tackle for loss knowing they still have an entire game ahead of them to blow multiple coverages on the back end. It’s like that video of the kid whose mother forces him to do one of the dances from Fortnite, which the child performs through tears. 

Swag is good until it’s unearned. Then it’s just kind of sad.