Joe Woods is gone but the Cleveland Browns’ biggest problems remain

The Cleveland Browns got rid of Joe Woods but the biggest issues are still here.

Cleveland Browns nation got their pound of flesh on Monday morning when the team let go of Joe Woods, almost sacrificing the former defensive coordinator at the alter of public opinion. Despite Woods’ tenure being rocky at best with the Browns, Kevin Stefanski never wavered on Woods until he presumably had no choice from the front office. Though that is speculation.

Woods was fired, and the Browns immediately reached out to interview Brian Flores, the former Miami Dolphins head coach and assistant coach to Pittsburgh Steelers defensive coordinator Teryl Austin. Flores got rave reviews for his coaching in Pittsburgh this season, and many were hoping the Browns would take a run at him in the offseason.

The team is officially doing so, and the ironic thing, the Browns may be interviewing Stefanski’s eventual replacement in the process. If Stefanski does struggle in 2023, the Browns will quickly replace him and if Flores is on the team at the time, it’d make all the sense in the world to hand the team over to him.

Getting Flores will help, without a doubt. He’s a good coach. The issue is, however, the problem was never Woods in the first place. It was slimmed-down defensive tackles that the team took riders on because analytics said they weren’t that timportant. It was having an entire crop of linebackers who weighed as much as safeties. It was prioritizing size in the secondary over skill.

This was a team that was literally built to stop Patrick Mahomes in the playoffs, but then never faced the Kansas City Chiefs in the playoffs again. Every move was designed so they were “faster”. And the Browns were fast defensively, but they lacked the conventional aspects of a defense, which would in fact be super necessary over the last two seasons.

The Cleveland Browns got rid of their defensive coordinator but not their problems

See, that’s what fans don’t get. This team didn’t have a play-making linebacker on their roster. Scream and cry about how good Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah is all you want, but the man is a safety playing out of position. The team doesn’t have a Micah Parsons or Bobby Wagner. They don’t have any sack-chasers or big-thumpers.

If you don’t think that matters, of course, it does. Andrew Berry and Paul DePodesta handcuffed this team with smaller, quicker players, that lacked power and in doing so made the unit less efficient.

Yes, as a pass defense unit, they did play well, especially in the second half, but in the second half they faced some of the worst passers in the league, and in some of the worst weather in the league. So the Browns were always going to have a helping hand there.

Yet, when the weather got colder, the opposing teams ran more. Only six times did the Browns hold an opponent to less than 100 yards rushing as a team. Eight times the opposing team went for at least 148 rushing yards, and less shockingly, they were 1-7 in those games.

It would’ve been worse too, except for the fact that in several of the games this year, the opposing team was running through the Browns like a hot knife through butter, only for them to pull a “Stefanski”. To which I mean, the Browns couldn’t stop the running game and the opposing team just started throwing for funsies.

In fact, that 1 in “1-7”, was the game where the Ravens posted 198 rushing yards on the Browns, only to close the game throwing 30 times.

The Browns’ defense is a mess. Their two best players in Myles Garrett and Denzel Ward go missing for stretches at a time, and the rest of the unit around them is made up of either decent starters that lack an impact, or middling to below-average players who hold the team back.

Berry, not Woods, was the issue on this defense and if Berry doesn’t actively go against everything we’ve seen from him in three years, the Browns are toast in 2023.