The Browns have highlighted the statistics of their offense this season.
Here they are:
*The Browns passed for 4,155 yards, the fourth-most in their history.
*For only the fourth time in their history, they passed for 4,000 yards and rushed for 1,500 yards in the same season.
*They had a 2.0 interception percentage, the second-best in Browns history.
*Their 12 interceptions were third-fewest in a 16-game season.
*Josh McCown was 14th in the NFL with a 93.3 quarterback rating after passing for 12 touchdowns with just four interceptions.
*Gary Barnidge had 1,043 receiving yards, the second-most ever by a Browns tight end.
*Barnidge’s nine touchdown receptions tied with Ozzie Newsome (1979) for the most by a Browns tight end.
*Running back Duke Johnson’s 61 catches are the second-most by a rookie in club history.
Yes, indeed, those are all numbers that catch your eye.
Now here are some other numbers from the 2015 Cleveland offense that will also catch your eye, but in a different way:
*The Browns scored 278 points, fewest in the AFC, third-fewest in the league and their fewest since 2011.
*In their last three games, they scored no more than 13 points.
*They were held in single-digits scoring three times. Two of those efforts came in a three-game stretch.
*In eight, or exactly half, of their games, they scored 13 or fewer points.
*They scored 10 or fewer points five times.
*Their high-water mark for points was 33, and they scored no more than 28 points in any other game.
*They scored 20 or more points just eight times.
And did I mention that the Browns were 3-13, tying for the second-worst mark in franchise history?
Let me repeat this yet again: It does not matter if you throw for a bunch of yards, catch a lot of passes, have a considerable number of yards receiving and don’t throw many interceptions. While all that is well and good, and CAN translate to good things, it doesn’t really mean anything – anything at all.
This is a league in which every rule change since 1978 has been made to take give something to the offense and take something from the defense so as to enhance scoring, because that’s what fans say they want to see when the NFL surveys them. When people with gray hair used to have dark hair, they saw the Browns beat the New York Giants 6-3 (the real score of the 1957 season opener) in what was a veritable fistfight that featured the two top fighters in Jim Brown and Sam Huff, and they walked out of Cleveland Stadium thinking they had just seen the greatest football game ever.
Young people today – and that’s the group of fans the league is targeting – don’t want to see that. Not at all. Never. Ever. Not in a million years. They’d rather have a root canal.
They want to see football games that are played like video games, with teams racing up and down the field and scoring points at will. They want to see games in which the score is 48-44, and the team with 44 has the ball at the opponents’ 10-yard line with time left for one more play to throw into the end zone for the winning touchdown.
Anything less than that is viewed by those young fans as having been a total waste of their time.
With all that having been said, then, when you don’t score points – regardless of what any of your other offensive statistics are – you have virtually no chance to win. That is a truism that absolutely, completely and unequivocally can’t be debated.
And it’s all about winning. Winning is the only statistic more important than scoring points.
As such, fans are waiting for a time in which a lot of wins, including some in the playoffs, is the one and only statistic that the Browns are busting their buttons about when the season is all said and done.
End of story.
End of conversation.
By Steve King
