Browns: Team wins over Jaguars but stumbles along the way

The Cleveland Browns were able to defeat the Jacksonville Jaguars on Saturday, but the Browns had issues with both sides of their team.

Another win is in the book, and yet another sloppy win goes with it. Such is the story of the 2020 Cleveland Browns and their desire to continually “win ugly”. A win is a win, and at the end of the day that’s all that matters, but the Browns had the opportunity to close this game out a lot earlier than the final minutes of the fourth quarter but in typical 2020 fashion, they just couldn’t find a way to do so.

Cleveland offensively was plagued by a failure to convert the easy plays. Sure, they made a lot of hard plays look easy, but when the opportunity came to convert a 3rd and one, or lob a soft pass into the endzone, the Browns just failed to convert. Some of it falls on Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield. Mayfield had a very good game. He could have had a really great game, however. Mayfield missed two potential touchdown passes and that allowed the Jaguars to stay in the game until the very end.

That said, the Jaguars wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with the Browns if they had been able to actually get stops. Against another anemic offense, the defense was unable to get any stops, letting Mike Glennon of all people tear them apart. Now, you’ll argue that Myles Garrett and Denzel Ward were unavailable and that’s what made the difference, except the Browns have trouble stopping bad teams when both are healthy. So that’s not an excuse this week. The Browns defense is just bad. Their biggest issue is getting off the field on third down, and that’s something that’s going to follow them.

At the end of the day, Cleveland is now 8-3 and are doing everything they’re supposed to be doing as far as expectations. You can argue that they haven’t faced many good teams, and I’d argue “who cares?”  They didn’t pick the schedule.

Cleveland has the Tennessee Titans next Sunday in Tennesse for what will be the teams’ biggest test of the year besides the Steelers. Should Cleveland win, they’ll secure their first winning season since 2007 as well as having swept the AFC South.