Let me start this article by saying I am not yet sold on Shedeur Sanders. I don’t have blind faith in his ability to turn this franchise away, unlike many of our fans. He definitely showed some flashes of his NFL potential – but also some flashes of the flaws that dropped him so far down teams’ draft boards last April, and he did not end the year with a very good stat line. But as I have said all season long, it is impossible to properly evaluate a quarterback when the team around him doesn’t help him at all. There are some people who want the Browns to trade up as high as possible, package some first-round picks together and draft Fernando Mendoza – and I would like to relay to those people the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If bringing in a new QB to save the franchise didn’t work the last 42 times we tried it, why should the 43rd attempt be any different?
According to Pro Football Focus, our offensive line had the 31st-best pass blocking grade in the NFL – ahead of only the Las Vegas Raiders – with 224 pressures and 29 sacks allowed on 643 pass plays. Our tackles alone allowed 143 of those pressures and 21 of those sacks while earning a 44.1 grade, which was easily the worst in the league. Not only is our entire offensive line (sans Joel Bitonio) awful, though, as the starting unit is also entirely composed of players who are now free agents. When one of the worst O-Lines in the league has zero returning starters, it stands to reason that next season will be even worse without making some major moves in the draft and free agency.
Our offensive line wasn’t the only group providing our quarterback room with zero help, however. We went into this season with the lowest-rated receiving corps in football, and at the end of the year were also second-to-last in the league in receiving yards per game (ahead of only the New York Jets). Our pass catchers had the ninth-most dropped balls in the NFL as a unit, but Jerry Jeudy – who was brought in to be our clear WR1 – was second in the league with 10 by himself after leading the league in drops with 13 last season. When your supposed best (and easily your highest-paid) offensive weapon can’t even be a safety net for your quarterback, it’s safe to say that you won’t have a very good passing season.
Last, and certainly least, we have Kevin Stefanski. Although he wasn’t calling plays during Shedeur Sanders’ stint to close out the year, it was his system that Sanders was learning and developing in before he got his chance. And while Tommy Rees was an immediate improvement over Stefanski’s play-calling, it was evident that the latter still had plenty of influence over the offensive schemes we were running, even after giving up play-calling duties. Kevin O’Connell said it best: “Organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations.” We have to put QBs in a position to succeed, rather than simply replacing them each year and expecting them to save our franchise. With the Browns front office already in the midst of its new head coaching search, we can only hope that they find someone more capable at running an offense than Kevin Stefanski was (although that should not be very difficult).
Whoever our new coach is will also need time to work out the roster in their image, which will take more than one offseason – especially with the cap hits that players like Deshaun Watson and Jerry Jeudy are taking up in the final years of their respective contracts. It’s another reason that I genuinely do not care who starts at quarterback for us next season – we won’t have the salary available to fully rebuild this team until at least next offseason. All I can ask for is that whoever our QB is has enough help to succeed or fail on his own merits – and if it’s the latter, we can replace him in 2027 when the rest of our team is built to support a rookie.
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