The Browns’ Defense Made a Week 1 Statement in the Competitive AFC North

Cleveland’s defense will be better this season, but we still have plenty to learn about a deep and talented division.

For observers of the AFC North, Week 1 offered a Sunday with plenty of opportunity for overreaction. With all four teams considered playoff contenders, seeing the Browns handily club the Bengals to the point where Joe Burrow was pulled from the game to avoid needlessly reaggravating his calf injury, and the Steelers’ looking like they were on the verge of relegation against the 49ers’ offensive machine, was a bit like taking these ideological popsicle stick houses we’d built all offseason and dismantling them with a bootheel.

The wiser course of action would be to relax. Let’s take a look at why:

• Cleveland, which beat Cincinnati 24–3, was always going to be better suited to play in a game like this. There was bad weather in Cleveland Sunday, which immediately lent an advantage to the Browns’ pass rush against a more stationary Burrow, who is still very obviously recovering from that preseason practice injury. Cleveland spent money this offseason specifically to upgrade its defensive interior, which would take pressure off Myles Garrett. Burrow, because of the calf injury, lacked his trademark pocket finesse. He was sacked twice and hit in the pocket 10 times; four times by Garrett alone.

Garrett was all over Burrow on Sunday :: Ken Blaze/USA TODAY Sports

• Cleveland clearly upgraded its defense schematically this offseason as well. There had been myriad complaints about former DC Joe Woods’s system, and Jim Schwartz, who spent the last two seasons with Mike Vrabel in Tennessee, was on fire Sunday. With two experienced pass rushers (Garrett and Za’Darius Smith), he was able to pick and choose his matchups and lean on man coverage in a way the Browns haven’t been able to in the past to generate pressure. Cincinnati had the unfortunate distinction of having to face a really good coach who hasn’t called plays in three years, thus scrambling what it’s been able to ascertain.

• The Browns will be an improved team from last year, though it’s interesting that the kind of club they’ve assembled—and wanted to assemble—gets less of an overall lift from a quarterback such as Deshaun Watson. Another reason why we shouldn’t quite overreact: Watson had a quarterback rating of 67.3, was sacked three times and threw a costly interception. He took well over three seconds per snap to throw the ball, and his completion percentage above expectation—a metric that looks at how many passes he completed given the situation versus what he should have—was a minus-12 (per NFL Next Gen Stats). So, what will the Browns look like when they’re taken out of an element that is perfectly suited for their offense, and forced to play gunslinger football? Wouldn’t it be funny if they could have just saved $250 million or so and had this kind of game with last year’s early-season starter Jacoby Brissett under center? As I predicted during the offseason, the Browns are going to need more from Watson on the ground to negate his reacclimation curve. Watson was best when running the football Sunday.

• Similarly, in Pittsburgh, Week 1’s game is a bit like judging TCU or Michigan for failing to perform in the College Football Playoffs against a powerhouse SEC school. The 49ers are one of the best teams in the NFL by a comfortable margin, and the Steelers are simply at a different developmental stage and vulnerable, especially, to teams with a miles-deep defensive line and an offense that can’t be contained by an opposition that prioritizes ball control. That doesn't mean that Pittsburgh can’t be relevant this year, but the 49ers are going to do this to a lot of teams on their schedule.

• While we thought this would be a nice benchmark test for the Kenny Pickett evaluation tracker, the second-year QB had to throw the ball 46 times against a powerful, amoebic secondary with absolutely no threat of a running game. In those 46 attempts, he did complete 4% of those throws over expectation (again via Next Gen Stats). His release time was faster than it was a year ago and he was more confidently throwing to the first-down marker with regularity, even though most calls the Steelers made after a certain point in the game were dead on arrival. Najee Harris carried the ball a whopping six times. One of Pickett’s interceptions occurred when his intended wide receiver fell. The second, when the Steelers were down 20, was the kind of throw Eli Manning defenders used to aggressively praise him for: trying to make something happen despite the meager circumstances, unconcerned about the impact on a final stat line. Sub Pickett out and put in any quarterback down three scores against this 49ers team, and the results are equally horrendous.

Next week, the Browns and Steelers will face one another, while the Bengals will host the Ravens, a team that comfortably handled the Texans but did not dominate. This will be a far better time—hopefully free of perception-altering torrential downpours—to see where teams stack up in a division we’d imagined to be one of the NFL’s best.

But, don’t let us stop you from punching your television sets while filming it for Reels clout, or buying an inordinate amount of stock in the idea that the Browns’ “plan” is coming to fruition after some six years of tweaking. That’s what Week 1 is for, after all. If we aren’t overreacting, what is the point?