Will the Browns take control of the AFC North?
By STEVE KING
It’s impossible to tell what, exactly, will happen next season in the NFL, let alone in seasons after that.
These teams — and their situations — change so much from year to year.
But with all that having been said, the AFC North appears for all the world to be there for the taking if the Browns want badly enough to take it. Command of the division for not just next season, but also for the foreseeable future, could rest in their hands — again, if they work hard enough and are focused enough to get it.
That’s the only conclusion, really, you can come to as all the teams in the division sit at home now and watch the AFC and NFC championship games this weekend, and then the Super Bowl two weeks after that, play out.
The Browns are young and talented. They look to be just scratching the surface of what they could be, and may well become — once more, if the want-to is within them.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, for so long the real team to beat in the North, appear to have gotten old all at the same time. No team is going anywhere without a good quarterback, and Ben Roethlisberger looked slow and befuddled down the stretch, and then even more so in the one-sided playoff loss to the Browns. And his teammates didn’t look much better. That’s a veteran bunch, and it appears Father Time may have finally tackled head coach Mike Tomlin’s team for a loss from which it can’t recover without some significant retooling.
The Baltimore Ravens and their franchise quarterback, Lamar Jackson, have now had three straight years in which they’ve played impressively in the regular season and then flamed out badly — tremendously unimpressively — in the postseason. To be 0-3 in the playoffs in the Jackson era — with the quarterback playing poorly each time — has to wear heavily on him and the rest of the team. They’ve got to have serious doubts that, as currently constructed, they can get to where they want to go.
The Cincinnati Bengals? They have a promising quarterback Joe Burrow coming off season-ending knee surgery, and not much else.
So, then, do the Browns want to begin the Cleveland era in the AFC North? Can they begin it?
We’ll see.
But if they don’t, then it’s their own fault — and no one else’s — for there is nothing and no one standing in their way.
