It isn’t hard at all to decipher the Browns’ 27-6 road loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday.
It really isn’t.
In fact, it’s incredibly easy.
When you can’t score more than six points, and in doing so fail to get even as much as one measly touchdown, you have absolutely no chance to win.
You can talk all you want about defense until you’re blue in the face, but in a league such as the NFL in which every rule change for nearly the last 50 years has been made to take something away from the defense and give it to the offense to enhance scoring, it’s offense that matters. Yes, of course, defense also matters, as does special teams, but in the big picture, they don’t matter as much — not nearly as much — as offense. People want to see offense. Every survey the NFL takes of its fans indicates that. They don’t want to see low-scoring games, so the NFL has done everything it can to make sure that there are points aplenty — or at least enough to make the games interesting.
The Browns played well enough defensively to have a chance to win. They did not do nearly enough offensively to avoid embarrassment, let win game.
That’s why the the Browns hired Todd Monken as their head coach. With his background, he is better equipped then a defensive guyto figure out how to make the Browns better offensively. And to do that, he has to figure out how to stop all the penalties, how to stop the pathetically slow starts, how to keep the pocket cleaner for the quarterback so he doesn’t get sacked eight times, how to run the ball better, how to do better converting on third down, and how to make it so that the offense can enforce its will in short-yardage situations instead of getting the defense’s will enforced on it.
Fix the offense, or at least make it palatableinstead of outright horrible, and you’ve done much to solve the overall problem.
That game was no fun to watch. At no point did the Browns make you think that they were ever going to do anything offensively so as to be competitive.
That was as boring as all get out.
As exciting as this season had been with all the Kardiac Kids-like finishes, that was about as much fun as getting a root canal.
Every team has a dud. This was the Browns’ dud, the second one they havehad this year, and the first since way back in the season opener at Jacksonville.
So, let’s not jump out of the plane just yet. Let’s take a deep breath, realize that the team we all thought was going to be 5-12 this year, us 5-3 at roughly the halfway point of the season. Yes, it could’ve been 5-2 and that would’ve been great, but it isn’t so you have to deal with it.
See you next time.
Steve King
