In case you want any extra proof that this 12 months is totally cuckoo, that society has gone off the rails and kerblooey, know that when the story of 2020 is informed, they’ll have so as to add another excessive reality to the accounting:
The Cleveland Browns completed with a successful document.
It’s true. It’s going to occur. The Browns at the moment sit at a sturdy 9-3, which suggests they’re a mathematical lock to complete the 16-game 2020 NFL season with extra Ws than Ls. No recount, no machine error, put this one within the books. It’s a rarity: the Browns haven’t completed with a successful document in 13 seasons. It’s solely occurred twice earlier than on this century. It’s like seeing a comet, or studying a coherent Journal sports activities column.
I’m not saying the Browns are going win the Tremendous Bowl this season. However I’m not not saying it, both. I’ve seen loads of craziness throughout this cockamamie 12 months—so have you ever, I’m positive. How can any of us rule out one other weird state of affairs, even this traditionally woebegone outfit enjoying significant soccer in February, or March, or late August, or at any time when they wind up enjoying the Tremendous Bowl?
(Sure, I do know Patrick Mahomes exists, as do the Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Browns in all probability must get by way of a kind of behemoths to go wherever. I’ll get to that in a second. Let’s give Cleveland a minute of affection right here.)
The Browns had themselves a day on Sunday. The field rating says they beat the Tennessee Titans, 41-35, however that solely tells a fraction of the story. This sport was all however over inside minutes, because the Browns went out and thunder-blasted Tennessee with 38 first-half factors—the largest first-half output in Cleveland franchise historical past. With 5 minutes left within the second quarter, quarterback Baker Mayfield had 4 landing passes. Cleveland scored on all six of their first half possessions, wanting mainly unstoppable.
It’s important to grasp: that is the kind of stirring soccer efficiency that normally occurs to the Browns. Although the Titans made it intriguing within the second half—the Browns briefly reverted into the Browns, Mayfield fumbling within the closing minute to permit Tennessee to drag inside a rating—Cleveland now owns its greatest document since 1994, when the 25-year-old Mayfield had but to be born, and the Browns have been coached by younger, taciturn lobster boat deckhand named William Belichick.
It’s a surprising reversal for a snakebitten membership. Detroit Lions followers pleasure themselves on being the sorriest franchise in soccer, and at 0-12, the 2020 New York Jets are having a traditionally fetid 12 months, even by fetid Jets requirements—that last-second Jets loss Sunday was Baryshnikov-like in its virtuosity. However the Browns have a case because the NFL workforce most famously intertwined with despair. It is a membership that completed 6-10 final season, had 24 dropping seasons in its previous 28 and has received 4 playoff video games since Nixon was in workplace. It is a city that devastatingly misplaced its cursed, dropping franchise to Baltimore—solely to switch it with fully new cursed, dropping franchise. It is a membership that that fired Belichick. No matter occurred to that man, anyway?
A brand new day? Maybe. A reinvigorated Cleveland workforce has been promised for some time. Final 12 months’s roster started the season swaddled in playoff predictions earlier than the entire thing went south once more. This isn’t a single individual’s lengthy, unyielding imaginative and prescient. Head coach Kevin Stefanski, employed from Minnesota within the offseason, is Mayfield’s fourth boss in his first three seasons. The membership’s common supervisor, 33-year-old Andrew Berry, is in his first 12 months. The present success was not at all assured.
Sunday’s victory got here in a “measuring stick” sport—a kind of contests for which the desk habitués on the pregame exhibits puff out their Brioni chests and say stuff like “We’re going to be taught one thing concerning the ______________ immediately.” The Titans entered 8-3, clear contenders, playoff winners final season, enjoying at house. After which the Browns…went proper on the market and blew the doorways off. I do know Browns followers will discover jittery nervousness from the second-half collapse, however they wrapped this one up early.
The aerials have been a bit anomalous. Cleveland’s largest risk in 2020 is just not Mayfield’s arm, however the legwork of its two operating backs, Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt, who collectively common 160 yards per sport. If the Browns beat you, they normally do it on the bottom, methodically, which is clearly what Tennessee anticipated—an assumption which Cleveland and Mayfield exploited early.
Sunday was the perfect sport of Mayfield’s NFL profession. The Heisman Trophy winner from Oklahoma, the No. 1 choose within the 2018 draft, has proven flashes of expertise to match his hype, however too usually, he’s been inconsistent and impulsive. Final 12 months, Mayfield threw 21 interceptions in opposition to 22 landing passes. This 12 months, he’s as much as 21 TD passes, however with simply 7 interceptions, and none since October. Below Stefanski, Mayfield’s sticking to the script. After the win over the Titans, Mayfield dropped a quote first utilized by Dwight Schrute, the imperious, short-sleeved salesman on the sitcom “The Workplace”:
“At any time when I’m about to do one thing, I feel, ‘Would an fool do this?’ And if they’d, then I don’t do this.”
That claims all of it, doesn’t it? “Sport supervisor” is just not a glamorous ask for a quarterback—it’s not why Mayfield’s in 40% of all present TV commercials—but it surely’s proving to be efficient, particularly if it dekes opponents and permits the Cleveland offense to ignite because it did versus Tennessee. Election-night analytics maestro Steve Kornacki (who did a khaki’d cameo in NBC’s Sunday Evening Soccer) provides the Browns a 97% likelihood of creating the playoffs, which historical past tells us it’s going to occur, in something moreover elections, or Cleveland soccer.
There’s nonetheless a month of normal season NFL left. There are greater canines than the Browns on the market, amongst them the 11-1 Chiefs, and the Steelers, who’re 11-Zero getting into Monday versus Washington, and sit above Cleveland within the AFC North. The Payments and the Dolphins —the Dolphins!—are getting it accomplished within the East. However in 2020, the Browns will win greater than they misplaced.
It’s accomplished. It’s actual. You already knew this 12 months was traditionally bizarre. Now for positive.
