Low On Fuel, And Victories, The Cleveland Browns Limp To The Finish Line

When it comes to playing out another empty season, no NFL team has more experience than the Cleveland Browns, who are currently engaged in playing out another empty season.

The Browns, who swung for the fences in their controversial trade for controversial quarterback Deshaun Watson, will finish the season in a familiar position: watching the playoffs from home.

With a record of 6-9, and two meaningless games left to play, the Browns have now missed the playoffs in 27 of the last 30 years, in 19 of the last 20 years, and in 10 of the 11 years the Haslam family (Jimmy and Dee) have owned the team.

Obviously, this year’s miss is not a fluke.

Last place Cleveland has two games remaining in this season: at Washington on Sunday, and at Pittsburgh on January 8.

Assuming it happens again this year, the last place Browns will have finished in last place in their division 16 times in the 24 years since they returned to the NFL in 1999.

This also is not a fluke, because the Browns have outscored their opponents for a full season only three times in the last 30 years (2007, 2002, and 1994).

The Browns this season won’t even be able to cash in on their own ineptitude, because their first-round draft pick this year, and next year, were both traded to Houston in the trade for Watson.

There has been no more controversial player acquisition in Browns history – or maybe NFL history – than the one between Cleveland and Houston on March 18 that brought Watson to the Browns in exchange for six draft picks, including three first-round picks. The Browns signed Watson to a five-year $230 million contract, guaranteed, even though they knew that, best-case scenario, they weren’t going to get five full seasons out of Watson, because of a looming, and at the time, indeterminate suspension for violating the NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy.

The subsequent 11-game suspension handed down by the league all but guaranteed that Watson, who when he did return following the suspension, would be playing for the first time in nearly two years, would not be able to play enough to impact the Browns’ season.

In that sense it was a lost season for the Browns, who stumbled out of the starting gate, losing five of their first seven games, and were never really a factor in the AFC North race. Cleveland was 4-7 without Watson, and since his return they are 2-2.

The Browns’ two remaining games against Washington and Pittsburgh are two winnable games at the end of another going-nowhere season for this stuck-in-the-mud franchise. But in reality, the games are demonstrably useful for Cleveland, as part of the bigger picture, with an eye towards the 2023 season.

The Washington and Pittsburgh games will be valuable to the Browns also as a way of allowing Watson to knock even more rust off his skill set, to familiarize himself even more with his receivers, and to further facilitate a working relationship, in both directions, between Watson and Browns head coach and play caller Kevin Stefanski.

The head coach has had a bumpy ride through the 2022 season. The combination of the Browns’ losing ways and Stefanski’s at times curious play calling has fanned the flames of controversy, and ignited what’s become a yearly Cleveland tradition following each failed season: intense fan and talk show debates on whether the coach should be fired, and when.

Just two years removed from being named the NFL’s Coach of the Year, the embattled Stefanski probably deserves a full season with Watson to see what the two of them can produce together. For all the controversy surrounding Watson’s past, in the present, when he gets his game up to speed after nearly two years of idle time, it’s not unreasonable to believe he could be Cleveland’s most proficient quarterback since late ‘80s Bernie Kosar or early ‘80s Brian Sipe.

For now, Browns fans – a rabble of such unmatched passion and loyalty that when the original Browns were moved to Baltimore the NFL almost immediately put another team in Cleveland – have no choice but to do what they’ve always done for the last quarter of a century:

Fight unrewarded patience with unmatched passion.