Browns: 4 good things and 4 bad things from Week 12 win

Bad

Baker Mayfield

….But it should’ve been a great game. Baker Mayfield completed 66% of passes and didn’t commit one turnover. He also missed at least two slam dunk passes for touchdowns in what could’ve put the game out of reach before the 3rd quarter started. Now, this is very much nitpicking, especially after a win against a team that could have been 5-5 if things broke differently for them. That said, I don’t see this as a team that’s going to be “lucky” to make the playoffs. They can make noise if they shore up these minor issues. Mayfield’s two misses sounded to be a problem of footwork and not talent, so hopefully, Mayfield can actually have practice time to work on that. Seeing as how often the Browns facility is closed lately, credit to Mayfield for being as good as he is with no real practice time to prepare for games.

Browns defense

Mike Glennon torched the Browns. The Browns had no pass rush and frankly couldn’t get off the field yet again on third downs. You’d like to say the lack of practice time hurt the Browns here, same as Mayfield, but we’ve seen what a protected and fully practiced Mayfield can do. We’ve yet to see the Browns defense do much of anything this year.

Kevin Stefanski’s two challenges

Again, didn’t see the plays themselves, but Jim Donovan flat out called the result of both plays correctly before Kevin Stefanski challenged the results. If Donovan and Stefanski are seeing the same things on the big board, why is Stefanski challenging them? It was a slam dunk that Harrison Bryant was unable to procure the catch in the endzone, yet Stefanski still challenged it? Then the Browns had a third and one, and Stefanski challenged that call to haggle over a few inches? Granted he won that challenge but as Donovan pointed out on commentary; why bother?

The refs

Browns fans can oftentimes be a bit overly passionate when it comes to the officiating crews, granted, which fanbase isn’t? To that end, however, the refs in this game apparently missed a few big plays. The most obvious was an egregious holding call against the Jaguars that went uncalled. There were also some other calls mentioned on social media that I’m unaware of at the moment. That said, at least it didn’t turn into Bottlegate 2.0.