A Week Three win, and a trip to DFW

Let’s not take too much delight in defeating the football team from Washington last week. Washington is terrible, their best defensive player missed most of the game, and despite five takeaways, the Browns still trailed going into the fourth quarter. I realize that at 2-1 the Browns are officially over .500 for the first time since 2014, and that’s worth noting. (Thanks national sports people acknowledging that fact about 15 times during the broadcast. We get it, the Browns have been terrible for a long time, roughly since WIlliam Isaly invented the Klondike Bar in Mansfield in 1922.) Regardless, the Browns locked down the win after outscoring Washington 17-0 in the fourth quarter with some bonafide smash-mouth football. It’s a strange sort of box score this week, the Browns scored 34 points, but only 300 total yards of offense, and Baker threw for only 156 yards. The Browns ran the ball 37 times, and threw it 23; while I do appreciate that this ratio reflects the strength of our team, I had high hopes of passes flying all over the place to OBJ, Landry, Hunt, and Hooper. At the end of the day, I shouldn’t nitpick a win, after all our stretch of 4 wins in 48 games isn’t distant history. For me, the positive takeaway from this game is that this defense is capable of making big plays and creating opportunities for the offense to have a short field. The negative takeaway is that I still don’t quite have a sense of what we are trying to do with the passing game. I’m particularly salty about Austin Hooper (Yes, I drafted him high in my fantasy football league) but right now he has all the earmarks of a guy who got the big contract, only to have productivity steadily diminish. Actually here’s a bold prediction: Harrison Bryant will finish the season with more catches and touchdowns than Austin Hooper. Time will tell obviously, but Bryant has a lot more fire in his play than Hooper right now.

It’s a road trip week, and The Browns find themselves in Arlington, Texas to take on the Dallas Cowboys. For whatever reason, the Dallas fan base comes into every season expecting to make a deep run in the playoffs, but then almost invariably they flame out along the way. They are a mediocre franchise by most measures (3 playoff wins out of 7 appearances in the last 20 seasons) and their most significant accomplishment might be the construction of their monstrosity of a stadium, AKA Jerry-World. The 1.2 billion dollar complex was largely paid for with taxpayer money, and even more egregious was the use of eminent domain to screw over homeowners whose property was usurped for the construction. All of this to create a facility that literally consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Liberia. 

Despite all the fanfare that surrounds “America’s Team”, they come into tonight’s contest with their backs against the wall. They are 1-2, and their only win was against a bad Atlanta team in week 2 by a score of 40-39. Even that win was a result of a bizarre onside kick, where the Falcons players apparently didn’t know the rules and gift-wrapped the win for the Cowboys. My point is that Dallas is not the team they think they are, or the national media thinks they are. Cleveland has a clear advantage in the running game, and I think Dallas is soft against the pass, as they’ve given up 9 touchdown passes in the last 2 weeks. Cleveland on the other hand has the opportunity to get to 3-1, and that would be the best start this team has had since the last millennium. So despite the fact that this is an early season game, there’s a tremendous amount riding on it for both teams, and I think it could be one of the most entertaining games of the weekend. 

What I anticipate is Cleveland committing to the run in the first few possessions, and hopefully creating some space to get the passing game going. The Browns defense can certainly give up points, so I think it’s going to be a barn burner and these teams are going to generate a lot of offense. Despite the Browns being a betting underdog, I am going to pick them to pick up a huge win on the road, by the score of 37-30.

Go Browns.