The Opening Drive 8/17: PFF Reactions From Browns vs Bears
Stats and Film from the Browns performance to open the preseason.
Preseason PFF grades are a trap if you take them at face value, and the Browns’ opener against the Bears is a good case study in why. The top of the offensive board is stuffed with players who are unlikely to see a regular-season snap, the defensive numbers are inflated by backups getting torched by other backups, and the two names everyone actually cares about — Shedeur Sanders and Deshaun Watson — sit in the middle of the pack rather than at the top. The value in this data isn’t the leaderboard. It’s what the leaderboard tells you once you adjust for who was actually on the field.
Start with the quarterback competition, since that’s the storyline driving every camp discussion. Watson posted a 65.5 offensive grade across a game-high 33 snaps, with his passing grade (70.4) comfortably ahead of both Sanders (58.1) and Dillon Gabriel (36.3). Watson’s performance will get a thorough breakdown in the coming day but overall he did more things at a starter level than those who came after him. Sanders, for his part, had some nice moments — a 56.8 overall grade — but he still has to defeat the bad habits that cost him any efficiency in his rookie season. Gabriel was rough in a day where he couldn’t afford to be. He’s fighting for any semblance of a spot in this battle and his 36.3 passing grade on only ten drop-backs did more to hinder his roster situation than anything else. We will break all of these dropbacks down in deep detail.
The receiver room is where the real signal lives. Gage Larvadain topping the entire offense at 78.7 on 16 pass-game snaps is a performance he needed to keep himself in the hunt to make the roster. Luke Floriea hauled in one chunk throw to keep his preseason momentum going. Denzel Boston had just one target, which ended up going for 15 yards, but you can see in his routes below where he flashed quite often.
KC Concepcion’s 77.6 is more relevant, since he’s a name the organization actually plans to develop, and pairing a strong receiving grade (69.5) with a 70.0 run-blocking mark on jet-sweep and screen-adjacent work fits exactly the Todd Monken usage pattern that’s been the through-line of camp coverage all summer. Here’s a look every route the rookie ran on Saturday.
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