Browns Sideline Hats on Amazon
Many people point to the Browns’ 3-1 record and rave about the progress they’ve made since last season, when they were 5-12, and even more since 2024, when they finished 3-14, their worst mark in seven years.
Yes, indeed, that is really impressive.
But you don’t have to go back nearly that far to gauge the breadth of thus turnaround. How about turning the clock back just over three weeks?
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It was the season opener on Sept. 13 at Jacksonville and, with 6:18 still left in the second quarter — barely past the halfway point of the quarter — quarterback Trevor Lawrence had just thrown his third touchdown pass to give the Jaguars a whopping 24-0 lead. The Browns were struggling mightily not just defensively but offensively as well. They had not moved the ball in the least bit. Quarterback Deshaun Watson was horrible. And it didn’t get any better. The final score of 34-10 did not, in any way, reflect just how one-sided the game was. To be sure, it looked like the varsity playing the freshmen. It was one of the worst starts in team history.
And new Browns head coach Todd Monken? His debut could not gone much worse. If’s no wonder he had never been a head coach before at any level, right? Would he even make it through the season? Forget that, would he make it to Week 2? Don’t laugh. You know full well that there were a lot of people in Cleveland who wanted to fire him. They were already mad that the Browns had passed over popular defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to hire Monken. Now they were even more ticked off.
It was so bad that former Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, now working as an analyst for NBC, quipped on “Football Night in America,” “The Browns is the Browns.” All that from a guy who had gotten his first taste of NFL coaching in Cleveland, working the Browns’ 2000 training camp as part of an league initiative for Black coaches.
Yeah, everybody and anybody — near and far — was piling on. The Browns were the talk of the NFL
for all the wrong reasons.
Fast-forward to now, and the Browns have won three in a row, the last of which being a scintillating 27-24 decision over the Pittsburgh Steelers on a Andre Szmyt’s 56-yard field goal with 10 seconds left on Thursday Night Football, to push their record to 3-1, tying them with the Baltimore Ravens for first place in the AFC North. The offense, defense and Watson are all doing much, much better — a 180-degree about-face, really — and Monken is the early leader — by far — in the NFL Coach of the Year race.
The Browns are the talk of the league now for all the right reasons.
No team in club history has changed its fortunes so quickly — a variable blink of an eye.
What lies ahead for the Browns? Their fans can hardly wait to find out.
Steve King
