The Cleveland Browns, perhaps more than other NFL teams, consistently struggle with overcoming their own mistakes, especially when the offense has the ball.
It has played out time and time again – the offense gets a little bit of momentum, a penalty (be it a false start, illegal formation, or holding call) is called, and the drive fizzles out.
Fans and media rejoiced in the offseason when the Browns hired Todd Monken as head coach because he was the type of “old-school head coach” who was finally going
to “lay down the law” and hold these lazy players accountable after so many years of lax treatment.
Or so the story went until the season began.
Week 1 against Jacksonville saw the Browns commit 11 penalties, then six more in Week 2 against Tampa Bay.
The situation reached an absurd level on Sunday against Carolina as the Browns were penalized 12 times, including five on the offensive line in one series alone:
- An illegal formation on right tackle Tytus Howard
- A false start on right guard Austin Barber
- A false start on Howard
- A holding call on left tackle Spencer Fano
- A false start on Howard
In the words of the legendary Green Bay head coach Vince Lombardi, “What the hell is going on out there?”
It is a good question, and an important one to answer if the Browns hope to keep the momentum of their current two-game winning streak going on Thursday night against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The offense is simply not good enough yet to overcome so many penalties, so what is the answer? More time on task in practice? Better mental focus from the players? Better coaching?
Monken was asked about the situation on Monday, and his answer was “all of the above”:
“Coaching and playing alike, mental stamina with shifts and motions, getting aligned properly, proper snap count. It’s all of the above. It’s hard when it doesn’t show up in practice. When it doesn’t show up in practice, it’s hard to wrap your head around why we had the issues that we did. But it’s got to be fixed. It’s got to be fixed in a hurry with a short week.”
All the penalties were problematic, but the false starts were particularly egregious, given that the Browns were playing at home and crowd noise wasn’t an issue.
For what it’s worth, Monken was not making any excuses on Monday:
“That’s embarrassing. We got to get it fixed in a hurry. It’s shitty football, I mean, it is what it is. You’ve heard me say it before, and that’s coaching and playing. And again, we had not seen that. You get one thing semi-fixed with your operation and get into the line of scrimmage, and then this comes up, and it’s Browns hurting Browns, and we know it. And now we’re going to work like hell to get it fixed.”
Of the starters on the offensive line, Howard is struggling the most, with five penalties and the lowest Pro Football Focus grade (50.3) among the starters, which has not gone unnoticed by Monken:
“If you’re trying to anticipate the snap count, and I told Tytus this today, it’s like a defensive lineman trying to anticipate the snap count. And if you jump offsides, you false start once, OK, right, like, all right, I get it. After that, it’s over. It’s not OK. It’s not kosher anymore. So that’s on him. He knows it, and we’ve got to get it cleaned up.”
With only one day of practice before the game against the Steelers, it seems unlikely that Monken will make a change, but if Howard struggles again on Thursday night, it could be time to give Dawand Jones a chance at right tackle in Week 5 against the New York Jets.
Other than that, there’s not much else Monken can do other than have the players work it out while throwing in some of that “old-school coaching” that got people so excited about when he was first hired.
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