The definition is unwritten
2021 looks to shape this team and the individuals on it beyond this season
We are in a defining period. There are times when life is thrown into sharper focus, when shared events pull the weight of history onto our shoulders. It happened twenty years ago, and it’s happening today as the pandemic continues to rage. These are moments when you can feel that we all stare at the same moon.
Sports does this regularly to sports fans. It happened yesterday when the unseeded teenager Emma Raducanu beat the unseeded teenager Leylah Fenandez in the final of the US Open. These moments give you a kind of déja vu. You can feel yourself watching them again as the highlights are shown for years to come. The narrative is written before your eyes.
The Browns are entering such a period. The anticipation for this season is beyond anything I have experienced. It has been a long time sine the Browns have been a credible threat to win the AFC North, several coaches and several quarterbacks ago. But the time is now. Two seasons removed from regularly scheduled programming when a patsy coach and the GM who hired him were fired, and the young quarterback who seemed so promising looked crushed in the gears of dysfunction.
Somehow he has been saved from that Victorian workhouse with all his fingers.
To Baker Mayfield, this season probably feels similar to the last, and to many before it. There are those who doubt him, and they are not quiet in sharing those doubts. We are all familiar with how Mayfield uses these doubters, serious or otherwise, to maintain that chip on his shoulder.
This season does differ from many before it, however. Last year he was playing for his career in Cleveland. Plenty had given up on him and were ready for next. This year, he comes in established as the Browns quarterback in a settled situation, with the same coaching staff and same offensive players around him.
Everything for Mayfield was too loud in 2019. From between his ears to his toes there was too much noise. Kevin Stefanski and Alex Van Pelt spent 2020 soundproofing Mayfield. What lies in front of him now offers the opportunity to quieten the external. If he plays this season as he finished the last, that chip on his shoulder may take more effort to maintain.
His friend Odell Beckham faces a different picture. He is yet to show everything he did in New York and missed a large amount of last season with an ACL tear. There has not been a need to quieten things around Beckham. It has just gone quiet. As he nears 30 and as he comes off serious injury, there are doubts that he is still the explosive highlight reel player he was at Meadowlands.
He is on the opposite side of the coin from Jarvis Landry, his football brother. Landry has been hailed as a key part of changing the culture in Cleveland, the emotional leader of this team and his quarterback’s safety net. Beckham has drifted out of the spotlight he earned in New York and into the shadows in Cleveland. The Browns do not need Beckham in order to put up points, they proved that last year, but if he can return to something like who he was he has the ability to raise the offensive ceiling of this team.
The Browns as a whole are a prime pick for regression this year. They won twelves games last season, scoring more than 30 points in eight of them, and more than 40 in four. The doubts come as they did all this with a negative point differential and a positive turnover differential, numbers which are always looked out for in identifying regression candidates.
THe counter to this is that the 2021 defense is incomparable to the 2020 version. The Browns have revamped their safety corps, turning it from one of the weakest in the NFL to one of the stronger units on the team. John Johnson III promises to be the centre fielder the team sorely lacked last year. Ronnie Harrison has had a full offseason with the team and hopefully will be healthier this year. Grant Delpit returns and can hopefully show what made the Browns take him in the second round.
They have strengthened at corner. They took Greg Newsome II in the first round of the draft, Ohio native Troy Hill followed John Johnson from the Rams, and Greedy Williams is healthy again following the nerve issue that ruled him out of the entirety of 2020.
Myles Garrett enters the season in much better shape than he ended it, limited by the effects of covid. He has been joined on the line by Jadeveon Clowney, who looks to reset the narrative around himself. Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah will buzz around behind them, hoping to disrupt with his speed of body and mind.
This is not a perfect defense. There are concerns about depth on the line, and the secondary has health questions. This will hopefully be a long season, and depth is going to be tested. Eyes are on Joe Woods. He had chickenshit to work with last year, and what the Browns got for the most part was chickenshit. He has a fuller team now, and will have to show the kind of defense he did in Denver. Otherwise it may be someone else’s turn in 2022.
The Browns begin the season how they finished the last: facing the Chiefs at Arrowhead. Kansas and Pat Mahomes sit right in front of the Browns and also on the horizon. The Browns know that if they want to get anywhere they will need to go through the minefield of Arrowhead, with their fans raining down their comically racist chant.
It is likely this early meeting will not define their season, much like early heavy losses to Baltimore and Pittsburgh did not define 2020, but the season ahead looks to define this team. What picture will be formed when the curtain drops?
