THE DEFENSE WAS HORRIBLE SO THERE HAD TO BE MANY CHANGES

By STEVE KING

There was a lot — a whole lot — of angst about the Browns’ recent release of defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson, and while I totally understand it in one respect, I don’t understand it at all.
Even though it has been stated numerous times elsewhere that he played well last season, the fact of the matter is that Richardson was only OK.The Browns defense was terrible — just terrible — in 2021, and so with that, then, no one other than end Myles Garrett and cornerback Denzel Ward performed well. The Browns had to make a lot of changes defensively in the offseason, just as they overhauled the offense last offseason. That meant plenty of new players and the release of plenty of others. Richardson was in the latter group.
He may return — the Browns would like to have him back at the right price, which was mostly why he was let go — but we’ll just have to wait and see. If he fails to return, then it is certainly not the end of the world. Good luck to him, then move on.
The Browns must be leaps-and- bounds better defensively in 2021 if the team is to get to where it wants to go. Most offenses are too good anymore to be stopped. You just hope to slow them down a little, and the Browns couldn’t even do that for almost all of last year. If Richardson was as good as some claim he was, then he would have made more of an impact and the defense would have been better. He didn’t, and it wasn’t.
This — decent players getting released for salary cap and other reasons — happens all the time in the NFL. The Pittsburgh Steelers, who are held up as a model by many football people, release good players all the time because they don’t fit anymore.
Let’s see how all this — the defensive line and the defense overall — plays out before anyone gets too upset.
After last year’s 12-6 overall finish, including a playoff victory and then taking the then defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs to the limit in the divisional round — General Manager Andrew Berry deserves that kind of patience from the fans, and media as well.