Washington linebacker Frankie luvu was all over Deshaun Watson with 2.5 sacks, 2 tackles for loss, 3 quarterback hits and 1 forced fumble.
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Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland. He has covered the Browns since 1984.
LANDOVER, MD
How much farther can the Browns fall?
Losing their third straight game to drop to 1-4 is one thing. Good teams can lose three in a row in any given season, right? But to do it with such bone-headedness and utter ineptitude has everyone confounded.
This is an experienced team, quite well-paid, and they’re getting worse by the week.
The 34-13 loss to the Commanders was only the fourth-worst lopsided defeat suffered in the Kevin Stefanski-Andrew Berry era. But the quality of play was never this poor. They looked like an expansion team.
The Browns were 0-for-12 on third-down conversions with their starting quarterback in the game. Deshaun Watson was sacked 7 times, many of his own fault. The longest pass play was for 19 yards.
The absolute nadir of the game, if not the Stefanski-Berry era, came early in the second half when the Browns had first-and-goal at the Washington 2-yard line and proceeded to:
* Lose 5 yards to a false start.
* Lose 1 yard to a sack when Watson got pulverized moving this way and that in the pocket.
* Lost a down by throwing the ball away.
* And then, incredibly, had to suffer a delay-of-game penalty when they were caught with 12 men in their offensive huddle.
“Obviously, [there were] miscommunications, which are completely on me,” Stefanski said. “I’ll take responsibility for all that. That looks like losing football to me. We had the wrong amount of people in the huddle.”
Stefanski would point the finger at himself at least six other times in his 6 ½-minute post-mortem.
“I wouldn’t call it bad effort,” he said. “The guys are doing what we’re asking them to do. We got outcoached out there. Single me out. I need to get it fixed.”
But everyone contributed, of course.
Jerry Jeudy dropped a touchdown pass. The line false-started three times. Watson lost the ball when he moved laterally into a sack. The defense had 12 men on the field two times. And the tackling was as bad as ever. Brian Robinson ran through Grant Delpit’s low tackle attempt for a touchdown.
And the brilliant rookie, Jayden Daniels, eluded sacks and made giant plays.
Delpit and Greg Newsome had him on a blitz and Daniels left them on the ground, sprinted to his right and dimed a 66-yard pass to Terry McLaurin. Another time, Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah had dead aim on Daniels for a sack on fourth down. Daniels put a move on JOK, leaving JOK to punch the ground in his wake, and raced around the right edge for 34 yards.
“I can’t be missing open sacks,” said JOK, who had an interception at the 1 to prevent another Washington touchdown. “I got to figure a way to get that sack.”
Denzel Ward had another interception knocked out of his hands by McLaurin. And the defense gave up even more giant chunks – a 50-yard run by Austin Ekeler, 28 by Jeremy McNichols, a 41-yard TD catch by Dyami Brown, a 33-yard catch-and-run by Ekeler.
That’s why the defense can’t blame everything on an offense that accounted for only 212 yards on 59 plays.
“That’s not the foundation we built. That’s not the culture we built,” JOK said about the possibility of finger-pointing creeping in. “We gave up 30 points. That’s on us.”
Watson was pulled for the first time this year, with 2:28 to play, and Stefanski said he thought of doing it earlier to keep Watson “out of harm’s way.” He did not consider making a quarterback change based on performance.
“We’re not changing quarterbacks,” Stefanski said. “We need to play better. I need to coach better.
“This is not a 1-person issue on offense. We have the guys, we have the coaches. We’ll get it fixed.”
Cooper, who had 4 catches on 10 targets for 60 yards, said, “To be honest, I don’t think Deshaun’s the problem. There’s a lot of moving parts when it comes to football, offensive-specific. There’s a lot of things we can collectively to improve ourselves. I’m not playing my best football.”
For his part, Watson started to offer some insight into the state of things on offense.
He said, “We have to find what we’re great at, what we’re good at, and perfect that. We’re trying to find out how we’re gonna use all the skill guys we got. Trying to figure out what type of offense and identity we want to be at.”
What exactly is the offense good at?
“We’re trying to figure that out,” he said. “We need to sit down with the coaching staff and figure it out.
“I’m trying to get the ball out as fast as possible. Trying to create and make plays whenever nothing’s there.
“A lot of teams are playing us with 2-high safeties, so we have to run the ball. We got to do that early and we got to do that often. For us to be able to take the shots downfield, we have to be able to get those guys to step up and take those shots.
“My job is to go out there and execute with the guys I have out there.
“This offense is gonna go as far as I go. End of day, we’re not doing enough offensively as a quarterback. I got to find ways to bring everybody else along with each other and go out on Sunday and eliminate all the self-inflicted mistakes that’s going to cause us to get behind the 8-ball and get into situations we don’t want to be in.”
Watson deferred a question about whether letting coordinator Ken Dorsey call plays would make a difference.
“That’s a Kevin question,” he said.
The problem is Stefanski doesn’t have many answers these days.