The Cleveland Browns suck.
I’ve been a fan my whole life, and any reasonable Cleveland Browns fan has to start with this singular statement. The team has not won a division title since 1989, and has only won one playoff game in over 30 years. The last two seasons have seen them win a total of eight games, and Cleveland won their final two of 2025. They’ve started over 40 quarterbacks since returning to the league in 1999, far more than any other team.
So yeah, they suck. But, weirdly, they’re also not that far away from… well, not sucking.
See, the Browns are searching for another head coach. They fired Kevin Stefanski, a good man who held the job for six years. Though everyone references the instability within the organization, Stefanski is actually the third-longest-tenured coach in Browns history, measured by total games coached. His 101 games are only outpaced by Paul Brown (214) and Blanton Collier (112).
Stefanski seems like a very good man who always does and says the right things. Players seem to like him. Coaches seem to like him. He’s widely respected in league circles. But despite winning Coach of the Year twice, his team regressed badly in 2024 and 2025.
Every coach has blindspots – things they don’t see well, or do well. Stefanski is no exception. But the reason why Stefanski is no longer coaching the Browns is that he either wasn’t self-aware enough to diagnose his own blindspots, or too stubborn to fix them.
See, Stefanski loves calling the offensive plays for the team. But his system is relatively average. It can be solid, but is mostly unspectacular. He makes poor adjustments, particularly in the second half of games. He seems unable to get the most out of his players, particularly at quarterback. He often calls gadget plays in key situations that are far too clever for their own good.
So, Stefanski is gone. Atlanta scooped him up, and he seems to be reuniting much of his old staff down south.
Let’s pause on Stefanski for a second and look at what’s right with the team. Mostly, that’s the defensive side of the ball, which is loaded with talent. Everything Cleveland Browns starts with all-world edge rusher Myles Garrett, who set an NFL record for sacks in a season in 2025. The rest of the line is talented, as well as benefiting from the attention paid to Garrett. That includes DT Mason Graham, who was named to the all-rookie team, as well as DT Maliek Collins and DE Alex Wright.
Rookie linebacker Carson Schwesinger won the PWFA’s Defensive Rookie of the Year. Devin Bush, fellow LB, is experiencing a career resurgence in Cleveland. The secondary has top talent as well, with Denzel Ward, Tyson Campbell, and Grant Delpit. In fact, the only real hole on the unit is at free safety, which could well be filled by cornerback Martin Emerson, who is returning in 2026 from injury.
It is rare to see a team have a record this poor with a nearly complete unit, complete with its defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz, still available. That is the primary reason the job is so intriguing, at least from my perspective.
It’s also a testament to how bad the offensive and special teams units were that a team with such an elite defense only managed five wins out of 17 tries.
In this day and age, I truly do not understand why any NFL franchise has BAD special team units. It’s one thing to rank near the bottom of the league statistically – someone has to, right? But the Browns special teams have had a knack for giving up big plays at the wrong times, and as a unit, that’s the thing they do most consistently.
It’s weird, no? They’ve had one of the league’s best punters in Corey Bojorquez and may have finally found their long-term kicker in Andre Szmyt (I need to Google him every time I write out his name). Their long snapper is good.
They seem to fail to find a good returner every year, but the coverage is the problem. Generally, coverage is scheme and discipline. The team has neither. Yet, this can be turned around with the right special teams coach. So it’s not something I consider really in the analysis of the quality of Cleveland’s job opening.
Now, bringing this thing full circle, the offense was BAD. At times, historically bad. They’ve had three different offensive coordinators and three different line coaches in three straight seasons. They’ve started a shit-ton of quarterbacks (I don’t feel like counting them, but I think it’s north of 10). Every year, Stefanski got pressure to give up the playcalling duties. He did it in 2024 and 2025. Things didn’t really improve significantly.
The one consistency here is: Stefanski.
If you consider Stefanski’s blind spot of stubborn lack of adjusting, it actually isn’t all that surprising. He seemed to dig in his heels deeper each year. This year, we saw it in full force when he stuck with quarterback Dillon Gabriel for longer than anyone thought reasonable.
Gabriel seems like a smart and driven kid. But he’s far too small for the NFL position, and his arm is barely good enough to toss the rock 10 yards. I’m all for giving things time, but Gabriel’s issues weren’t developmental. He just doesn’t have it from an athletic standpoint. Can’t coach what he needs. Yet, Stefanski stuck with him, even calling over 50 passing plays for him.
From a talent standpoint, there’s no question the Browns are lacking, and that contributed to the team’s offensive woes. The offensive line is in complete disarray. The team lacks a top wide receiver, and its best player at the position has a maddening penchant for dropping balls that no NFL player should.
Then, of course, there is the albatross that is quarterback Deshaun Watson. The team paid three first-round picks and $230 million guaranteed to bring Watson into the fold. To say he’s been a disappointment is a massive understatement. He hasn’t even taken a snap since mid 2024 after tearing his Achilles tendon… twice.
On the surface, this doesn’t look like a good situation. But let’s spin it to the positive for a moment.
The 2025 Cleveland Browns draft class was one for the ages. The defense brought in two young studs, and the offense did the same. Running back Quinson Judkins looked fantastic, despite missing most of training camp and having a poor offensive line to block for him. Tight end Harrold Fannin Jr might have been the steal of the draft, after setting a Browns rookie record for receptions.
And then… there is Shedeur Sanders.
Sanders, the son of Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, has a large and very vocal fan base, especially considering his bizarre drop from an anticipated Top 10 in the 2025 NFL draft all the way to #144. As the team’s fifth-round choice, he was mostly ignored in the early weeks by Stefanski, who obviously favored Gabriel. That’s not to say I think he “hated” Sanders (the internet seems unable to let that rumor die), it’s just that he preferred someone else.
When Sanders finally got the chance to start, he was a mixed bag to say the least. Statistically, he wasn’t any better than Gabriel or Joe Flacco before him. But Sanders managed to rally a lame duck team to a 3-4 record and displayed an X-factor the team hasn’t seen at quarterback for a little bit. He’s obviously got the athletic tools and has an eye for a big play. He needs discipline and time more than anything. But he has a real chance to be a franchise quarterback.
With the existing investment in Watson – who is still accounting for $130 million in cap space over the next couple of years – the team has to give him another shot in 2026. Sanders certainly has earned one, and has virtually no cap charge for the next couple of years.
So the question anyone has to ask themselves is this… what if another coach can get the most out of either Watson or Sanders?
If either one can be made into even an average NFL quarterback, that gives the team some solid offensive pieces. Cleveland also has two first-round picks, as well as a high set of choices by virtue of its terrible record. They’ll even be able to reclaim some cap space from some departing players. So it’s theoretically possible they could build at least an average offensive line, while grabbing one of the draft’s top wide receivers. This would allow a new coach to truly put his own stamp on the offense.
Combine this with an owner who is absolutely willing to spend whatever it takes to be a winner (though Jimmy Haslam does have a bit of a reputation as a meddler), as well as a new stadium coming in 2029… and this job doesn’t look so bad, does it?
In fact, the right coach could well make this team a contender as soon as next year and be ready for a real run in 2027. Maybe.
Or, the Cleveland Browns could continue to suck. We’ll see.
On a personal note (feel free to stop reading)…
It’s been far too long since I blogged. I’m intending to do much better going forward. Since I’ve last been on here, I both started and stopped working for another sports journalism site. To be honest, I doubt I’m going to do that for a third time, unless it’s something drastically different. This last one paid $4 per thousand views. To put that in perspective, if I spent an hour researching, writing, posting, and promoting an article – all of which I’m supposed to do – and then was lucky enough to not have another writer steal the same idea (which happened all the time), I had to bring in 3,000 views just to make minimum wage. Then, after the site migrated to another platform, its site analytics got messed up. They asked us to continue to write, despite having far less than usual traffic while they fixed whatever was wrong with Google. So basically… work for damn near free, while they fixed their site to make more money… for them. Doesn’t work for me. So, for the foreseeable future, I’ll be here. Sports journalism right now is a sad state of affairs, truly.
