Give current Browns, not former, credit
By STEVE KING
Kings of the Jungle. pic.twitter.com/zPbWIj0Yq0
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) November 7, 2021
Everybody is going to focus on the absence — the eradication — of selfish wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. — and his whiny, little-kid attitude — as being the reason the Browns slobberknocked the Cincinnati Bengals 41-16 on Sunday at Paul Brown Stadium.
Blah, blah. Blah. That’s reaching for the low-hanging fruit.
Was it a factor? Well, sure? That’s obvious.
But the reason for the lopsided win has less — much less — to do with the malcontent Beckham, and more — much more — to do with his former Browns teammates.
Indeed, let’s give credit where credit is due, to the players still on the team and the coaches.
The Browns, having lost three of their previous four games to fall to a pedestrian 4-4 and put their season in peril, got sick and tired.
They got sick and tired of hearing about all the good stuff they weren’t doing. And they got sick and tired of hearing about all the bad stuff they were doing.
When you get sick and tired, you — whether you’re a football player or someone who wouldn’t know a football if it hit you in the head — react one of two ways. You either retreat into the corner and sulk, or you get mad, your pride gets challenged and you try your darnedest to affect some change.
The Browns wisely chose the latter reaction, which says a heckuva lot about them — their players and coaches, including the head coach, Kevin Stefanski. A team takes on the personality of its head coach, and Stefanski is a guy who doesn’t get caught up in a lot of fancy rhetoric, or even much rhetoric of any kind. He says little, and what he does say is measured.
He said his team was “desperate” to beat the Bengals, and that laser-focused mindset is exactly how the Browns approached it. The result was that they got up early and just kept going. The margin of victory could have been — and should have — been much bigger.
Nonetheless, the reaction of the Browns — not so much the often-used “addition by subtraction” mantra that paints with way too broad of a brush in this case — is something on which they can continue to build, beginning with this week and the days leading up to Sunday’s important road trip to meet the red-hot New England Belichicks.
