Dawgs By Nature
Cleveland is a broken franchise with few avenues to improve over the season’s final 12 games.
During his prime as Cleveland’s sports talk host from 1972 to 1987, Pete Franklin would reach a point during the sports season where he would hold an on-air funeral marking the end of one of the city’s sports team’s playoff hopes.
These are most associated in the minds of fans with the local baseball team, which was essentially eliminated at some point in August.
If Franklin were still alive, he would likely be holding one of those funerals today for the Cleveland Browns, who have managed to eliminate themselves from a playoff berth after just five games.
That is not 100 percent accurate, of course, as there are still 12 games left on the schedule and the Browns have yet to play a game within the AFC North Division. And no one within the division is running away with the title at the moment.
But if 10 wins is the bar to sniff a playoff spot, then the Browns need to go 9-3 the rest of the way just to hit double digits in wins. Anyone who has watched this team can see just how difficult a proposition that would be for the Browns, who are mired in a three-game losing streak after another depressing Sunday afternoon.
This team is broken on so many levels that one or two more wins might be a stretch, let alone winning enough to earn a playoff bid. The defense can’t tackle anyone, injuries continue to hit both sides of the ball, and the offense is operating at an expansion-era level of play.
Consider that Cleveland’s offense is currently:
That 3.8 yards per play is just a tick ahead of the 1999 expansion team that averaged 3.65 yards per play, and Cleveland’s streak of five consecutive games of scoring less than 20 points to open the season is the team’s longest since 1999. That season the Browns did not break 20 points in a game until Week 8, which is certainly within reach of this year’s squad.
Fair or not, and it is mostly fair at this point, much of the blame for the lack of production from the offense falls on the shoulders of Deshaun Watson.
According to The Athletic, Watson’s EPA per pass play of -0.302 has him sitting at No. 618 out of 621 qualifying quarterbacks who started the first five games of a season since 2000. Focusing on just Cleveland quarterbacks in that period, Watson is behind such luminaries as DeShone Kizer (-0.188 in 2017), Brandon Weeden (-0.076...
