Cleveland Has Become Perfect for Joe Flacco ... and Vice Versa

When the veteran quarterback’s phone didn’t ring this spring or summer, he saw a silver lining. And now he is guiding the Browns toward the playoffs.

As the third quarter closed, Joe Flacco had thrown his third interception and, finally, this ridiculous magic carpet ride he’d been on—from his couch to crunch time of the NFL season in the time it took to fly from New Jersey to Cleveland—appeared to be reaching its conclusion.

The Browns were down 17–7 to the Bears.

The old gunslinger was 15-of-29 for 123 yards against a fast-improving Chicago defense.

Doubting Flacco? A lot of people justifiably were.

Yet, somehow, in the teeth of a wild season through which Cleveland first discarded Joshua Dobbs, lost Deshaun Watson to injury and cycled through veteran (PJ Walker) and rookie (Dorian Thompson-Robinson) backups, that was the moment when having Flacco would be more important than ever. Mostly because it’s when his experience, of 16 NFL seasons and even more so 38 years of life, would matter most.

Thompson-Robinson (right) has played in seven games this season but only three in which he saw more than one passing attempt :: Scott Galvin/USA TODAY Sports

“The biggest thing is, you can’t feel sorry for yourself,” Flacco said a couple hours later, as he was leaving the stadium. “You have to be a grownup. … If you have somebody that you really look up to, you’d hope that they wouldn’t react in a poor way. It’s your job to react and act the way that you would want them to react if you looked up to them. Not just on the football field, but I’ve experienced enough things to think like, Hey, you might not want to do this, but that’s what you do.”

Flacco was just getting started.

“Here’s the thing that I’ve realized over the last years. Growing up, I don’t know if my dad always wanted to go out there and do that with me, but he did it anyway,” he continues. “I think your first thought is, I’m not super excited to do that, and then you think, I must be a sh---y parent. And then you realize that’s not it. Everybody has these feelings, and you put them aside, and you do what you’re supposed to do. This is a very similar situation to that.

“Believe me, I felt like s---. It didn’t change the fact that I had to go out there and do what I’m supposed to do.”

And, in short, a guy old and grizzled enough to be a team dad did exactly that: what he was supposed to do, what the Browns signed him to do and what his own dad would have had him do.

All of which went a long way for the Browns on Sunday. Flacco, of course, isn’t the first quarterback to have the kind of fourth quarter he did, going 11-of-13 for 212 yards, a score and a 144.4 QB rating. What is rare, though, for a quarterback of any age, is to do it after having the first three quarters that Flacco did.

It showed maturity. It showed resolve. It showed Flacco’s age, yes. But most of all, it showed how, just maybe, the 38-year-old is making a really good, tough Browns team even better.

---

We’ve got three weeks and one game (Eagles-Seahawks on Monday night) left in the regular season, and a lot to get to in recapping Week 15 in this week’s MMQB. We got you covered on …

• Case Keenum’s feelings Sunday, the Texans and the “generational” QB he’s backing up, plus a whole lot more in the MMQB Takeaways.

• The Bengals’ remarkable Saturday win and what it says about Zac Taylor’s program.

• How Baker Mayfield seems to have found the perfect landing spot in Tampa Bay.

But we’re starting in Mayfield’s old home, and we’ll tell you the story of how the Browns’ new locker-room dad is making it his own.

---

So the idea that Flacco was chilling on the couch in Jersey is maybe a touch overdone.

Yes, he was following the league like so many of us do on weekends—with his Sunday Ticket subscription on YouTube. And no, he wasn’t in some sort of intensive program with a quarterbacking guru.

But he did have someone to throw to. His younger brother, Tom, a former Towson quarterback, was working to get a shot in the XFL through the fall, so the two of them would go to the local high school about twice a week to stay loose. No receivers. No real complexity. Just enough to be ready when a call came.

“We would throw into spots—I’d be trading off throwing into spots with him,” Flacco says. “No real live action. Just keeping the arm in shape enough so that if I did show up somewhere I wouldn’t have to deal with any soreness or anything like that.”

Flacco knew, at this point of his career, and his life, his mind would be as much of a draw for a team as his arm. And by keeping up with the league, he stayed mentally sharp.

The calls, though, didn’t come. On one hand, that forced Flacco to confront the idea that he might be done. On the other, as he saw it, he was never forced with having to make a decision on whether he wanted to enter into the kind of situations that are often available to street free-agent quarterbacks—to borrow his word, they are usually sh---y ones. So while it was hard, Flacco could muster peace with it.

“I don’t know if you’re ever O.K. with it,” he says. “To a certain extent, it’s easier. It’s not like you have to make a decision. The league made a decision for you. I definitely would have carried a little bit of bitterness for a certain period of time. … Here’s where I stood, and I probably had felt like this for the last couple years—there was a point in the offseason where I was a little nervous somebody might offer me. I didn’t know if I would take it.

“It’s like, I don’t know what the plan would be for me. Don’t know what kind of team they’re going to be. I’d also feel a lot of, Ah, it’s not a great opportunity. It’s an opportunity. I have to take this opportunity. The fact that nobody called in the spring and summer, I was keeping an open mind in looking at the silver lining in it.”

The silver lining was that, just maybe, the sort of situation that did come along would.

That happened about a month ago, and word got out in a way that matches up pretty perfectly with a guy who’d be staying in shape at a local high school with his brother. It surfaced with a picture of Flacco deplaning off a commercial flight on the night of Nov. 16 going viral on social media. The next day, Flacco worked out for the Browns. The next week, he was signed to the practice squad as a third quarterback, with Watson lost for the year.

Days later, Thompson-Robinson got concussed in the second half of a loss to the Broncos, Walker struggled in replacing him and the door was open for Flacco, a week after he’d signed.

---

The first part of how Flacco fit in—the off-field piece—came together without the quarterback even knowing it.

After losing in Denver, the Browns traveled to Los Angeles to spend the week out West working at UCLA ahead of their Week 14 game against the Rams. That Monday night the quarterbacks and offensive linemen had their weekly dinner at Mastro’s in Beverly Hills. And Joel Bitonio told me in last week’s MMQB that it was that night, over steaks and drinks, that Flacco really started to win over the offensive huddle.

Bitonio (right) is the longest-tenured player on Cleveland’s roster :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

Bitonio did say that it was more of an unsaid thing among the linemen and was just a result of Flacco’s coming off like the regular guy he’s always been. I relayed that to Flacco on Sunday.

“That’s cool to hear,” he says. “I didn’t know. Maybe it was just going out to dinner. It was just another cool opportunity to have a dinner with your offensive linemen and your quarterbacks. You always enjoy those. That was a bunch of fun. For me, it was actually cool to be out there in L.A. If we were back in Cleveland, then I’m just trying to kill time over at the facility, where here guys are hanging out and then avoiding going back to the hotel room where I’d be by myself. …

“You had people around constantly. It was definitely an advantage for me to be out there.”

The second part of the fit came with Kevin Stefanski trying to assimilate Flacco into the offense on the fly. That he’d played, after 11 years as a Raven, with the Jets twice (and under two different staffs), Eagles and Broncos did make him, admittedly, more adaptable than he might’ve otherwise been—and that gave him the shot to meet Stefanski and offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt halfway.

As they were readying him to start against the Rams, as the week wore on and the chances that Thompson-Robinson would be cleared dwindled, Stefanski had Flacco go through the playbook and circle plays and concepts he was comfortable with. Conversely, Flacco was thinking of the other 10 guys in the huddle—that do-what-you-may-not-want-to-do-for-the-greater-good dad thing again—in telling the staff to challenge him.

“I wanted to relay to [Stefanski], This is your offense, I’ll adjust, I want to run it the way you want it to be ran,” Flacco says. “Those guys, they have awesome heads on their shoulders. You get to see Kevin every day lead a team in a calm but forceful way. And then AVP, same thing, just the way he delivers the message. You can just tell that these guys have been around the block. They make everybody feel comfortable and confident.”

That’s where Flacco was at SoFi Stadium that Sunday, even in a 36–19 loss, throwing for 254 yards and finding a way to get Cleveland to the fourth quarter with a chance. That set the stage for a 311-yard performance in a Week 14 win over Jacksonville. And yesterday.

• Watch Browns games with Fubo: Take advantage of holiday pricing today!

---

Flacco will get the credit, as the quarterback often does, for turning the Titanic away from an iceberg Sunday, after three picks and three quarters controlled by the Bears.

But in the aftermath of it, he was reminded of a conversation he had with Elijah Moore.

He and the slot receiver played together as Jets, and Moore told Flacco when the quarterback arrived in mid-November, The guys here are great. This is a great locker room. “He went out of his way to say that,” Flacco says. And that’s the sort of thing that matters on a day like Sunday, when everyone may not have their A-game from the jump.

“The resilience of this group is incredible,” Flacco says. “Even with the injuries, we have talented players. They’re talented players. When you get a bunch of talented players and they actually have their heads on right and they all work hard? It’s a great locker room. … It’s a bunch of talented guys, but they’re all working toward a common goal. You can feel it in here. Got to give credit to them.”

Of course, Flacco deserves some, too. And there were a few key moments Sunday when, again, less than a month separated from NFL Sundays on the couch and those workouts with his brother, he was very obviously a difference-maker. All came in the fourth quarter.

• It started with Flacco’s first throw of the fourth quarter, right after his final pick, the defense forcing a turnover on downs and a false start that put the offense in first-and-15 from its own 28. That one was a shot to Marquise Goodwin, running a deep post, which Flacco hit for 57 yards. In some ways it worked to reset the quarterback himself.

“I probably had three different touchdown passes [on the play that was picked] and I threw an interception,” he says. “That was demoralizing. That was the one that really got me. The first two, to a certain extent, they are what they are. We’d already shot ourselves in the foot, not only with penalties and stuff like that, but that was demoralizing, to get that turnover right there and feel the energy in the stadium, and then two seconds later it’s gone. To kick things off with that long shot to Marquise, I think definitely got us in a little better mindset.

“We didn’t convert that drive into a touchdown. But at least we got something, because we had been getting absolutely nothing.”

Flacco is bringing life back to the Browns offense :: Scott Galvin/USA TODAY Sports

• A field goal got the Browns to within seven and set the offense up to tie it on a second-and-4 with 3:18 left—on a ball that Flacco seemed to drop in between three defenders, where Amari Cooper snared it and did the rest to score a 51-yard touchdown.

“He’s coming across the field, and it’s at the point in the game where you’re looking, if you get little shots, you have to take those,” Flacco says. “You can’t be trigger-shy just because you made some mistakes. I felt him wrapping around the mike linebacker. I knew there were some people out to the right, but you’re trusting everybody else that’s running their routes to do their job. I felt the hole in there and let it go. The rest is him.”

• And the next possession, the game-winner, Flacco would tell you, was all David Njoku. Flacco hit him for 31 yards on an out-breaking route on the first play of that drive, and the veteran tight end was just getting started—“a great drive-starter.”

Then the offense went backward, with Cooper called offsides, an incompletion and a screen that went nowhere, putting the Browns in third-and-15. In that spot, Flacco’s cool demeanor and Njoku’s ability to find open field would bail them out.

“They brought it from the right side,” Flacco says. “They had seven guys up. They brought it from the right side. We were hot as could be, but there was a huge hole there over to the left. I was like, All right, Dave, just get there, keep running. He did a great job of just feeling that space over there and just drifting a little upfield around me to get the ball over top of the one guy that was over there. Once again, a great feel by him. That’s what got us there.”

Thirty-four yards later, the Browns were positioning Dustin Hopkins for a 34-yard chip shot that would get Cleveland to 9–5.

---

After it was over, Flacco did get the chance to process things.

He knows what he’s able to give a really talented Browns team that’s sustained a rash of injuries. He’s level. He’s experienced. He’s confident and out there for the right reasons.

But with the win still less than an hour in rearview mirror, he was also grateful for what the Browns have given him—which is an incredible shot to see what he’s got left and pilot a team that’s well put together, fun to be around and as resourceful as any in the NFL.

And as he reiterates that Cleveland “was the first and only” opportunity he had to play this year, he’s reminded that the silver lining of the silence in the spring and summer is now playing out in front of him. So it’s easy for him now to be motivated to make the most of it.

“Every single year things happen to quarterbacks,” he says. “People would ask me, some people just assumed I retired. When you talk to some friends and other people in passing, I would tell people I think the silver lining is I could get picked up by a decent team, so we’ll wait and see. Mentally, I’ve probably been there before like that. I’ve probably had that feeling the last couple years. But when given another opportunity, I felt like I had to take it.

“I feel fortunate the way it all worked out. If you’re on a good team and you’ve been put in these situations, it’s hard not to believe that there’s a different power working at hand to give you these opportunities.”

So, like he said, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for himself after three interceptions in three quarters Sunday. And there’s no question the Browns are a lot better for it.