Head coach Hue Jackson said after the team’s opening training camp practice on Thursday that the Browns are “a step better than we were a year ago, by far.”
Hmmm.
Let’s look at that statement.
First of all, it’s important. The NFL is all about winning. It’s all a team getting better from one season to the next. Any team – the ones at the bottom and also those at the top – have to improve. They can’t stay the same. There is no staying the same, for if a team does that, it is actually getting worse. A team either gets better or worse. It is either going forward or backward. It can’t run in place, for that’s like running in quicksand.
So for Jackson to say the Browns are better, is a big deal.
Before we get too carried away with that realization, however, we need to remember that the Browns were just 1-15 last year, which was both their worst record ever and the worst in the entire league. Thus, being better than that isn’t really hard to do. What would be harder, actually, is to be worse. Perish the thought.
OK, then, what is a step better?
It’s what Jackson saw through the spring practices, and what he saw Thursday afternoon, with the absence of many of the little nagging things that bedeviled the Browns last season, such as penalties, turnovers, physical errors and mental errors.
It killed offensive drives, killed defensive stands and, way too many times, made the Browns look like they were the junior varsity playing the varsity. Jackson obviously saw that, and it haunted him throughout the offseason. When that ugliness had disappeared Thursday as the Browns began camp, he immediately felt better.
Yes, the Browns are big on using analytics, and that’s a good thing, really. But sometimes, you need only the eye test to see all you need to know, and when you’re a coach like Hue Jackson and you have a trained eye for these things, it puts a jump in your step. You know that while the Browns still have miles and miles to go, they’ve already taken a step in the right direction in 2017.
