Picking Up The Pieces From The Cleveland Browns’ Calamitous Season

He was speaking for the Cleveland Browns’ organization as a whole, but his words never rang truer for the organization’s long-suffering fans.

“The toughest part of today,” said Browns General Manager Andrew Berry on Tuesday in his season-ending Zoom session with reporters, “is we’re not going to play meaningful football games for another nine months. That leaves a pretty sour taste in all of our mouths.”

Following a mouth-watering 2020 season in which, under NFL Coach of the Year Kevin Stefanski, they rolled to a 12-5 record, reaching the playoffs for the first time in 18 years and winning a postseason game for the first time in 24 years, the Browns in 2021 laid one of the biggest eggs in franchise history.

Viewed by many at the start of the season as a Super Bowl contender, the Browns instead staggered to an 8-9 record, missing the playoffs for the 18^th time in the last 19 years.

Cleveland beat only one team with a winning record. That team was Cincinnati. The Browns beat the Bengals twice, but the second win came in the last game of the regular season, in which the AFC North champion Bengals rested many of their key players.

How dead in the water were the 2021 Browns? They played the last three months of the season without winning consecutive games.

Their offense was expected to be one of the most high-scoring in the league, but instead the Browns were out-scored by their opponents (371-349) for the 14^th year in a row, and the 26^th time in the last 29 years, dating to 1990 (they didn’t get outscored from 1996-98 because they didn’t have a team).

“A missed opportunity,” Stefanski called his team’s failed 2021 season. “We weren’t consistent enough to win consistently.”

If there’s a silver lining to the Browns’ flat-tire season it’s that it gives them an early jump on preparing for the 2022 season. The elephant in the room for those preparations is the status of quarterback Baker Mayfield, who tried to play through multiple injuries, and all it got him was a disastrous season. In 14 games Mayfield was near the bottom of the league in most of the important quarterback statistics, including touchdown passes (17) and interceptions (13).

It came at a bad time for Mayfield, who is trying to prove to club officials he’s worth a big contract extension. He will make $18.9 million in 2022, but the question is, from whom?

For now, Berry has little choice but to say what he said Tuesday, when asked about Mayfield’s future in Cleveland.

“We fully expect Baker to be our starter (next season) and bounce back,” Berry said. “It’s easy to forget Baker had his most productive year under Kevin in this offense (in 2020). We know Baker’s work ethic; we know his drive. We’ve seen him as a talented passer in this league.”

On January 19 Mayfield will have surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder. How much of Mayfield’s dismal 2021 season was attributable to his shoulder injury, and to numerous other bumps and bruises – in just 14 games he was sacked a whopping 43 times, fourth-most in the league – is open for discussion.

What isn’t debatable is that this Browns team is built to win now. Can a healthy Mayfield provide the quarterback play necessary for a potential Super Bowl contender? Can the Browns afford to devote another year of waiting to find out the answer to that question?

Some feel Stefanski’s play calling did Mayfield, and the team’s offense in general, no favors in 2021. In his first year as coach Stefanski drew raves for his play calling. Not so in his second year, to the point that some wonder whether being the head coach while also calling the plays may be too much to put on the plate of an inexperienced head coach.

Berry isn’t one of those wonderers.

“We feel good about Kevin as a play caller,” Berry said. “That’s one of his strengths.”

Mayfield’s poor season, Stefanski’s questionable play calling, a rash of injuries and positive COVID tests that impacted multiple key players, poor team chemistry, the distraction of Odell Beckham Jr.’s messy mid-season departure from the team, and the seeds of dissent it may or may not have sewn in the locker room.

There is no shortage of theories on why this Cleveland Browns team started the 2021 season with sky high expectations, but ended it with endless head-scratching speculation over how and why everything went so sideways, so fast – and how best to fix it.

“We were too inconsistent in all phases. We’ll review everything across the roster,” Berry said.

“Anytime you fall short, you second guess everything,” Stefanski said. “There are a ton of things to look at and learn from.”

And, unfortunately now, for the season’s-over-early Browns, plenty of time to do exactly that.