The 2015 Cleveland Browns still have something to prove

There will be a lot of fatalistic talk this week about the Cleveland Browns. Conclusions will be reached in fans’ minds and on media members’ lips about what the 2015 Browns are after a really dismal effort in St. Louis. It will be wondered aloud if the team quit and I have to own up to the fact that even I half-jokingly brought up the idea of looking ahead to the NFL Draft. It’s true that this Browns team is something of a known quantity after seven games and only two wins, but we really have no idea just yet.

There are many shades of gray when you’re talking about an NFL team that’s clearly not going to compete in the playoffs, let alone the Super Bowl. We know that the Browns are not that. What we don’t know yet is if this is a team that’s getting better and learning or if it’s a team that is impossibly broken with no future that needs to be turned over in drastic fashion. You won’t find that answer in the tape of an awful game in the St. Louis dome. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait to see what the Browns do in the next week as they play two games in five days against the 5-2 Arizona Cardinals and the 6-0 Cincinnati Bengals.

Drastic turnover is something of a never-ending cycle, as Browns fans know all too well. The team is bad because they’re not talented enough. The team is bad because there’s no continuity and they never get a chance to grow together. The team is bad because they don’t draft well enough and there’s got to be a better coach out there. While some or all of these things have been true over the years, it’s a delicate balance between letting the guys who made the mess clean it up and finding new people who will hopefully not make a mess the next time. While some fans are currently looking for an entirely new cleanup crew, I’m still holding out hope that Mike Pettine, Ray Farmer, and this roster of players show a willingness to grab the mop themselves.

The Browns lost, but they played a good game against the Denver Broncos. They followed that up with a real stinker against the St. Louis Rams including all kinds of unforced errors and self-inflicted wounds like penalties and fumbles. I won’t count them all up for you again, but it started from the very beginning with Taylor Gabriel and continued right until the end with fourth quarter fumbles by Travis Benjamin and Josh McCown. Even before the Benjamin fumble, the Browns were in the game despite their struggles. It was 17-6 and the Browns still had more than 12 minutes to go in the fourth quarter. This was not a team that had quit even after continually failing themselves for three-plus quarters. Of course, two more turnovers and an injury to Josh McCown later and the Browns had to have known they were done for the day. That’s not much to build on, and that’s the scary part looking forward.

Browns fans obtained a scouting report on the Arizona Cardinals Monday night as they faced an AFC North rival Baltimore Ravens team, did they need it? The Browns were pretty steep underdogs in Vegas against the Rams and they’ll deservedly be underdogs against the Cardinals at home on November 1¹. The Cardinals will have a winning record regardless of what happened on Monday night, and their roster has decidedly more talent than the Browns. You have to give the Cards a coaching edge as well with Bruce Arians at the helm. No matter who ends up being healthy enough to play quarterback for the Browns on Sunday, I expect the Cards to have an advantage with Carson Palmer.

All those stacked odds lead me to the conclusion that we’ll find out a whole lot more about who these Browns are by what they do following such an abysmal game against the Rams. I’ve stated consistently that you can’t always find the answers to the questions you want to answer by staring more deeply at the evidence in front of you. That’s certainly true in training camp where you look for signs of stardom in Danny Shelton in August against practice squad offensive linemen. You can’t find those any more than you can find definitive conclusions in the Rams debacle.

There’s still a chance that the Browns can be a team that’s building toward something rather than one that needs to be torn down and started over. They have the power — from Mike Pettine to each and every player on the roster — to prove that they’re worth believing in, even in a season where there’s little to no chance of a playoff game. It’s a tryout that will happen before our eyes as fans and more importantly, before Jimmy Haslam. I’ll be rooting for the Browns to continue to play hard and show some things because I hate the thought of starting over whether we’re talking about the coaching, front office, or even the majority of the roster.

1. 4.5 points as of Monday [↩]