Week 7 TNF Recap - CLE vs DEN

 

He, so, by the way – if you would be interested, I find myself talking over the broadcast of any game I'm watching with other people, and usually beat the commentators with the same information. Maybe I should Twitch. Hit me with a like or a comment or a retweet or a share or something if you might be interested. It will not be an interesting visual situation, and I don't know if I can set it up to be for free – I want it to be for free – but, yeah. Let me know somehow if you'd be interested in hearing these-style rambles, but during a live football game.

I'm not good at asking for this. You're supposed to boss your audience around, right? Yeesh. Let's just talk about

Thursday Night Football Recap

Cleveland Browns (4-3) vs Denver Broncos (3-4)

Going in to this game, I said many things. This was the #3 game in my Game Power Rankings, and I gave it many fewer words than I wanted. You only get credit for the things you write or in some other way record, so you have proof. You don't get credit for private thoughts you didn't share with anyone until they started proving right before your eyes.

See, that's the thing about only saying what's easy and obvious, isn't it?

I didn't say that the Browns weren't going to struggle running the ball, because while I believed it was true, I didn't know whether it would be. How was I supposed to know that Stump Mitchell, Browns' running backs coach, was an actual Magic Black Man and the beard to match isn't a prop?

I probably shouldn't have made that joke.

I didn't say the Browns were going to run on the Broncos because the Browns shouldn't have been able to run against the Broncos. The Browns are down their top two tackles, their top two backs. The strength of the Broncos' roster is their front-seven. With the Browns down Baker Mayfield, everybody in the world knew Kevin Stefanski was going to want to run the ball. He was going to want to run the ball with Baker. Without him, it was a certainty they were going to try to hand it off 40 times.

But I don't think I was alone in keeping my lips shut on the subject of the Browns dominating the line of scrimmage. I shouldn't have been. Because I called their first drive to my girlfriend like I'd scripted it – except, I will admit, the touchdown run. I figured they'd want to get cute there and try a screen, something to Beckham to try to get him going. Instead they went with the obvious football play and just punched it in with their back.

Their back, by the way, who may have given us the greatest performance by a third-string runner since Jonas Grey.

Damn. That dude's gotten his name mentioned in these pages twice, and I've only been doing this one season. My football references are dated. (As are my comedy references, come to think. Would you prefer I made Centaurworld references? Cus I could.)

And not just D'Ernest Johnson, put some respect on his name. Demetric Felton had a great day too. And now everybody in the footballlwatching world knows that the Browns have a fullback, and he's pretty damn good.

But, seriously, we were talking before the game, and I said what they're going to want to do is get Keenum working on some rollouts to start the game. And I wrote that the Browns were going to win on the effort of Jarvis Landry on third downs alone.

Which they did. Let me tell you, I might bruise my shoulder for how hard I'm patting my own back for that one.

I turned to my girlfriend after the PAT, and I told her that Denver were going to need to respond with seven points of their own, or this was going to end up being a very long night in Cleveland for the Broncos.

Teddy Bridgewater and his offense came thundering out of the gate with the exact same offensive gameplan. But where Case Keenum caught everybody in white jerseys completely off guard by rolling to his left, and the Browns' zone blocking scheme carved huge holes into the Denver defense's third level by taking advantage of overpursuing and out of position defenders, the Broncos' offense did none of that.

What happened in Denver that they have no running game? Why are Royce Freeman and Philip Lindsay not on this team? Like...

I haven't watched much Denver football. Frankly, I still resent Elway his Super Bowl wins during the end of Marino's career. I realize they were the same age – same draft, right? – but I was a kid at the time, what did I know? All I knew was Elway was representing the AFC and Marino wasn't. And really, since Manning left, what has Elway's legacy been? One whiff after another—

And Fangio called Bridgewater courageous after the game!

Not that I disagree. But how bad is Drew Lock that you're going to talk about this guy like he's the only survivor in a massacred foxhole? Holy shit, Fangio threw his entire offense under the bus but Teddy B.

And maybe for good reason. These dudes stake their entire reputations, sometimes the golden years of their careers, on these players. In the case of Vic Fangio, I think it might be entirely on the players at this point. He's been there long enough to establish his culture, his scheme, and the linebackers and defensive backs were so out of position against the run.

The Browns ran a 1960s offense.

When I try to teach the tactics of football to my girlfriend, I always tell her – offensive football is all about the off-tackle right run play in the NFL. Vince Lombardi made his bones with the Packers Sweep. If you couldn't stop the Packers Sweep  – in other words, if you can't stop the off-tackle right run play – you can't stop anything Lombardi was going to do to you on offense.

We watched the Browns win that way last night. Now, it's ugly, winning with the running game – because a defense can get stops and pin you on third down. That's the entire point I'm making here. If you can't stop the run – if you can't stop the most basic runs: off-tackle right, iso right, counter left, and their opposites, you are doomed.

All night long, Denver was biting on the pass-fake against run calls and getting sucked in by the play-action in pass calls. I would say it was a masterful piece of playcalling – but I predicted the gameplan. How did Fangio not?

See, this is one of those situations where I'm going back to the players and their preparation. The Broncos have a young secondary, and their linebackers are extremely inexperienced. But none of that is an excuse for not being able to play fundamental football.

And it's really no excuse for Von Miller to have gotten beaten so badly before his injury. He talked way too much about being their best player, about it being his responsibility to step up. Then he's playing poorly and goes down. Not a great look. You know who did get a good look, though? Shelby Harris had a phenomenal night. He had I think a couple of sacks, a couple of tackles of Keenum on what could have been big runs, when the defense got runs stops, it was him beating his blocker... not to mention the blocked field goal.

The offense Stefanski called last night was the same offense you'd call in Pop Warner. Well – maybe Middle School; it was a little more aerial than Pop Warner. But kids can sling it, too. Talk literally about telling another team that you don't respect their ability to play fundamental football. That suggests to me a lack of preparation. And preparation and the mental game are the responsibility of the players.

I read a wonderful essay the other day about education. The thesis was basically that we don't know how we learn and that you can't brute-force teach anyone anything. Which puts learning solely in the realm of personal responsibility by the time you've graduated college and moved on into the professional world. University is supposed to teach you, if nothing else, how to teach yourself. You are in massive debt so you could learn how to educate yourself.

Kinda fucked up.

But a coach can't make these players memorize their assignments any more than a director can make his actors memorize theirs. It doesn't matter how good they are. Even - I don't know, I don't like movies enough to build out this metaphor— Even Ridley Scott couldn't have made The Room a good movie. Not with those performances, not with that level of preparation.

This Browns team is exciting. The defense still isn't fixed, it isn't perfect, but golly gee do Myles Garret and Jadeveon Clowney cover up a lot of holes. It helps when the opposing receivers can't (or won't) catch anything. It helps even more when Teddy B is throwing everything away because he respects your secondary's ball skills.

Good shit.

I should have said before that this one was a crossroads game. I said it about another, and I didn't want to try to hype up every game with possibilities for both teams. I didn't believe that the Broncos were going to be competitive, and I don't think I portrayed it that way, either. I should have said this game was a crossroads game, because it was.

The Broncos at 3-4 are heading in an entirely different direction with their season than the Browns are 4-3.

Denver are staring up at the Raider and Chargers, two very competitive teams with A-plus quarterbacks, both playing at a high-middle level. And the Chiefs are still in this Division. The Broncos are out of the race, and I don't see any way of arguing anything else. They've only played one of their Divison games, and it was a spanking at the hands of the Raiders – the worst of their three rivals. And they've only beaten three of the worst teams in football: The Giants, the Jags, and the Jets.

I don't know what's going on with the Broncos' receivers, and I don't care. Those dudes are either not open at all or they can't make routine catches for their quarterback. I thought Teddy gave up on a lot of plays and a lot of drives, but I also felt like Teddy was only down 10 points in their darkest moments. Even down 3, though, there was no real threat of a comeback. Even the touchdown that closed the final gap felt like a formality. Like NFL teams score touchdowns here, but the Browns aren't giving the ball back.

And they didn't.

The last drive felt like a celebration.

And I loved seeing his linemen pick him off the ground and tell D'Ernest Johnson to celebrate after his final run of the night – after sealing a victory with another plus run through an out of position Broncos defense. He'd barely so much as smiled the whole night. It was nice to see his face as he trotted off the field, a man acknowledging a job well done, but never allowing the moment or his emotions to get too big for him.

This win was a big deal. Not only for Cleveland and their playoff hopes, with the Bengals set to win this weekend and make this a wide-open race, but for the young backs Johnson and Felton. The legends of their careers began last night. No matter what else they can tell their children once it's all over, they'll have this one night, when the whole football world was watching and they made a professional defense, one of the most vaunted and feared in the League, look like an outmatched Pop Warner team.

Great stuff.

Can we skip the rest of today and Saturday and get to Sunday, please?

Thanks for making it this far. This one was real informal. Probably turned out less like I imagined it would than you would like. But I don't want to paint by numbers and tell you a story you watched.

Do I think that Case Keenum should get the job moving forward? No. He's a good quarterback, but we've seen how he plays in the Playoffs, and the League doesn't need more than they've already gotten of that. Baker is a good quarterback. He's young and he's limited and he thinks he's a different style of quarterback than what he is, but once he figures himself out, he'll figure the game out, and watch out – because I think Keenum's ceiling is somewhere above Baker's floor, and really what we got last night was a glimpse at Baker if he steps it up in a meaningful way on the field – not just in guts and effort and passion and practice.

Beckham's hurt and not an impact player in this League anymore. But Landry was back on the field for the final rushing play. I love that guy's guts. Let's see if he can keep the killer fumbles and emotional penalties to a 0 this year.

I'll talk at you soon. Maybe today with some reactions to things I can't jive with, but definitely tomorrow with something.

Until then.