PHILADELPHIA — The offensive ineptitude looked familiar. The defense playing well for a large portion of the day and giving up a handful of big plays in big moments looked familiar. The penalties, in number and magnitude, looked incredibly familiar.
Still, it’s hard to fully explain how the Cleveland Browns actually crumbled and lost their fourth straight game Sunday, 20-16, to a talented but wholly unimpressive Philadelphia Eagles team. The Browns were as awful all day as they’ve been all season on offense. In the fourth quarter, though, after overcoming an extremely rare offensive facemask penalty by an intended receiver while the ball was in the air, they needed just three yards in two plays to score and bring about a decision — kick a PAT to tie or go for two and the lead.
But it all fell apart with not one but two false start penalties — the first with rookie guard Zak Zinter being baited into moving before the snap; the second when fifth-year tackle Jedrick Wills Jr. flinched as the Eagles showed an all-out blitz on fourth down.
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From the 3-yard line prior to the Zinter penalty, the Browns ended up back at the 13. They ultimately had to kick a field goal to cut the deficit to 20-16 with 3:54 left. The Eagles then successfully drained the clock on two Jalen Hurts completions and kneeled out the final minute and 48 seconds.
The Browns are 1-5 because they can’t score — they have one touchdown in their last 29 possessions with Deshaun Watson at quarterback. Every Watson dropback remains an adventure, and even after Watson threw his most decisive and accurate pass of the season to Amari Cooper to erase Cooper’s facemask gaffe and set up first-and-goal, the Browns sunk themselves.
With no touchdowns come no victories. And though the string of penalties, drops and blown coverages are also part of the story of this Cleveland team spiraling in a season of high expectations and record spending, what’s painfully obvious to even casual observers is that the offense is completely broken. The Watson experiment is not working, has not worked and will not work.
Still, in the postgame press conference after yet another loss headlined by an inability to score, Browns coach Kevin Stefanski said the team will stick with Watson as its starting quarterback.
What’s the fix? Clearly, Stefanski does not know that answer. The Browns continue to fail and continue to stick with the same quarterback, despite being the only NFL team that’s yet to reach 20 points or 300 yards in a game.
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What’s the sell on sticking with Watson, with whom the Browns are completely stuck? Only Stefanski can answer that, though he keeps putting the blame on himself and not sharing any real detail on his thought process or who else in various high levels of the organization might be involved.
The more the Browns falter, the more obvious it is that they need a change, a spark, anything. But, at least right now, they seem content on sticking with the player for whom they sold the farm in March 2022. That trade with the Houston Texans included the Browns giving up three first-round picks and handing Watson a fully guaranteed $230 million over five years. The team still carries more than $170 million in cap commitments to Watson for future seasons.
What’s the return on investment? Well, Rodney McLeod, a safety playing his 13th and final season, has scored two of the Browns’ last three touchdowns, both on returns. The first came when Cleveland forced a fourth-quarter fumble in Week 4 at Las Vegas. The Browns didn’t score again in that game after McLeod brought them within four (they missed the ensuing PAT attempt, actually), and they didn’t score a touchdown in Week 5 until garbage time, when they were already down 28. In the latter game, the Browns were 0-for-12 on third-down attempts with Watson in the game.
A streak of 26 straight failed third-down tries with Watson at quarterback ended in the third quarter Sunday. Yes, 26, spread over three games. The Browns didn’t convert any of their first seven third-down tries against Philadelphia, as part of another awful showing that yielded 108 yards of offense through three quarters.
The Browns finally found some success in the run game in the second half, and Watson finally started throwing some accurate passes ahead of the arrival of the blitz in the fourth quarter, but the results were the same. The Browns’ lone touchdown Sunday came on a 50-yard return by McLeod after Myles Garrett blocked a field-goal attempt late in the first half.
Myles block + Rod return = tie ballgame#CLEvsPHI on @NFLonFox and NFL+ pic.twitter.com/bXuspyqnrX
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) October 13, 2024
Thanks to that play, despite having just 71 yards of offense in the first half, the Browns went to the locker room tied, 10-10.
By this team’s standards, those 71 yards counted as progress. (Seven days earlier in Washington, the Browns had managed just 53 first-half yards.) And the 96 yards Cleveland racked up in the fourth quarter Sunday was a veritable offensive explosion, but it only resulted in two field goals.
The Browns were completely blown out by Washington in Week 5, but in heartbreaking losses to the Giants (Week 3), Raiders and now in Philadelphia, the offense had 10 fourth-quarter possessions with a chance to tie or take the lead and produced exactly one touchdown. Blown chances at redemption are becoming a trend, too.
Watson finished this game 16-of 23-for 168 yards, after he completed 11-of-12 passes in the second half for 122 yards. He went over the 100-yard mark on a 35-yarder to Jerry Jeudy to start what became the Browns’ final drive, but that was one of just two plays of more than 20 yards the Browns recorded all day. The other was a 21-yard screen pass to Pierre Strong Jr. for the offense’s initial third-down conversion.
Watson has topped 200 passing yards just four times in his 18 starts with the Browns. Not 300, no — 200, a mere four times, and he’s done it zero times this season.
Pierre marches down the field for the first!#CLEvsPHI on @NFLonFox and NFL+ pic.twitter.com/cnyzL0w0sq
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) October 13, 2024
With two touchdowns, McLeod actually shares the team lead with Cooper. That’s how bad things have been for the Browns, and it’s that level of bad before you even get to deconstructing how touchdowns late in losses to Washington and Dallas make the numbers less grotesque than they appear.
Entering Sunday, the Browns were averaging 3.8 yards per play, the worst of any NFL team in six years. Including McLeod’s scores and a Week 2 safety, the Browns still have just 96 points on the season. When they finished winless in 2017, they had 94 through six games.
In their latest disappointing performance, the Browns were forced to make multiple offensive line changes, as injuries mounted. But the lack of any early-game chain moving and any credible downfield threat continues to invite opponents to blitz, and a defense that thrives on creating pressure never gets the chance to play with the lead.
With the final drive Sunday as the latest painful example, the team’s problems aren’t all on Watson. But he’s done little to show he’s capable of fixing them, either, and the season has slipped away. Maybe mid-October is too early to know exactly what expensive escape route the Browns can find next February or what the long-term ramifications of this five-alarm fire might be, but Stefanski owes it to the defense and the team as a whole to make a change at quarterback.
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For now, anyway, Stefanski says he won’t. So, what’s bad keeps getting worse, a dreary big-picture outlook keeps getting cloudier and — ahead of a three-game homestand and the start of AFC North play — the Browns are already toast.
Maybe Stefanski will reconsider. Maybe ownership will reconsider who’s sitting in the big offices. Or maybe this team truly will follow an 11-win season that included five starting quarterbacks with a one-win season behind one starting quarterback.
What will that prove? How will things ever change? Short of McLeod scoring about 35 more touchdowns, the message from the head coach is that the Browns are fine with staggering futility.
(Photo: Kyle Ross / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
