Once he got close, it took Browns defensive end Myles Garrett a while — well into the fourth quarter of Sunday’s last-play 20-18 victory over the host Cincinnati Bengals in the season finale — to finally break the NFL single-season sack record.
MYLES GARRETT STANDS ALONE 👑
— ESPN (@espn) January 4, 2026
He's the new NFL single-season sack leader! 😤
(via @NFL)pic.twitter.com/kc41w1k4bD
Now we’re all wondering how long it will take before we know if his head coach, Kevin Stefanski, also gets sacked.
In a game in which Garrett recorded the magical 23rd sack, besting former New York Giant Michael Strahan, who was watching while working his job as a NFL studio analyst on FOX, the Browns triumphed, finishing with a 5-12 record after two rookies, quarterback Shedeur Sanders in leading the drive to set up the try for the deciding 49-yard field goal as time expired, and Andre Szmyt in making it, proved their worth to the team going forward.
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It gave the Browns back-to-back wins for the first time in 35 games, dating back to the 2023 season when they qualified for the playoffs as a wild card.
But was that — or any other positive achieved on Stefanski‘s six-season watch — enough to convince team owner Jimmy Haslem to grant him
the opportunity to come back in 2026? No one knows.
I, for one, continue to hope that it did. It certainly wasn’t pretty at times, and it was the second straight season in which the Browns finished with double-digit losses, something that certainly can’t happen again, but they could do a lot worse than Kevin Stefanski. His calm, and his persistence and refusal to give up, kept the team playing hard right up until the end.
And that counts for something. It certainly counts for something, because there are several struggling teams in the league that simply gave up down the stretch.
Tearing things up again isn’t going to solve anything. Building on a foundation that began to come together with a group of talented young players, is definitely the way to go.
This opinion comes from a guy who wanted to fire Stefanski before the midway point of the season as the team struggled right from the get-go.
But in stepping away from it, the benefits in staying the course became obvious.
We’ll see if the powers to be agree.
Stay tuned.
Steve King
Myles Garrett Trading Cards on Amazon
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