The Cleveland Browns should have won against the Minnesota Vikings. I’ve seen people blame everyone on the roster, from Dillon Gabriel to Denzel Ward, but the only person who’s truly at fault for our loss in London is Kevin Stefanski.
The game plan, as I predicted, was run-heavy. We were easing Dillon Gabriel into things and that’s fine – there’s no point asking a rookie to take deep shots against a top-3 pass defense, especially not when runs and checkdowns were working. I was actually very happy with how most of the game played out – but as soon as we took the lead in the 3rd quarter, we stopped playing to win. We had four possessions in the 4th quarter and we only got one first down. That statistic is a direct reflection of Stefanski’s playcalling and mentality: playing to protect the lead instead of playing to extend it. He was perfectly happy to punt on every drive as long as we were winning – and our defense could only hold up for so long. When you’re on the field for practically an entire quarter, you’re bound to get tired and you’re bound to get beaten.
Potentially even worse than the playcalling in the 4th quarter, however, was Stefanski’s clock management. We had the ball with a 3-point lead and 3:24 left on the clock, and the Vikings had all of their timeouts. Kevin correctly ran the ball on both 1st and 2nd down, losing a yard in the process but forcing the Vikings to stop the clock twice. Then, inexplicably, he called a pass play on 3rd down – and not an easy checkdown or flat route that would have guaranteed a completion, but a play that required Isaiah Bond to beat his man and for Gabriel to feed him on the sideline. The pass was incomplete, and we stopped the clock for the Vikings for free. The entire drive took 11 seconds.
As if that decision wasn’t bad enough, the Vikings were driving down the field – down three points with only one timeout left and 59 seconds remaining in regulation – and Stefanski decided to help out his former team once again. Instead of forcing them to play quickly and score, he stopped the clock twice. Not only did the Vikings get time to draw up their plays, but the Browns were left with no timeouts for a drive of their own. Without calling those timeouts, there’s a decent chance that Minnesota is forced to kick a field goal to send the game to overtime. I’m not saying that we definitely would have won the game – but had he not helped out Minnesota by stopping the clock for them three separate times, we definitely would have had a better chance.
With all that being said, I’m still reluctant to call for Stefanski’s job. I know that his defensive coordinators have carried him to both COTY awards, and I know that he plays too conservatively whenever he has a lead. His playcalling often gets predictable, he’s terrible at making in-game adjustments, and his only response to our team’s failures each week is that “we have to be better.” I know all of this. But we just drafted two rookie quarterbacks and have spent the last six months ingratiating them into Kevin Stefanski’s offense – an offense that, when it works, is so much fun to watch. At its core, his offensive identity is a heavy-hitting run game, play-action passes, and two-tight-end sets. The personnel we have, minus our perpetually-injured offensive line, are tailored perfectly to running it. I know it didn’t work at all last year with Ken Dorsey, but I truly believe the solution for this season is for Stefanski to give up playcalling again. We should let the rookies keep running the offense they’ve been running for their entire careers – but with Tommy Rees wearing the headset instead. Giving a rookie QB two different playcallers in a season is nowhere near as drastic or detrimental a change as getting rid of his head coach – and at worst, we can always move on from Kevin in January.
I still have faith in this football team, and I still believe that we can win double-digit games this season. This offense can be competitive in the National Football League – but not until something is different. Stefanski doesn’t need to be fired – yet – but a change needs to be made.
The post Kevin Stefanski: A Change Needs To Be Made appeared first on Cleveland Sports Talk .