The Cleveland Browns struggled through a rough 2016 season. But is the team really in bad shape? Let’s bust three myths surrounding the current team.
As the Cleveland Browns worked their way through the 2016 NFL season and the losses piled up, a weekly debate took hold among fans and media members.
By virtue of their record, the Browns certainly had to be not only the worst team in all of the NFL, but there was talk that they should be in the discussion for the worst team in league history.
While there is some truth the cliché that “you are what your record says,” that is a lazy way to view this year’s Browns.
The Browns may have finished at 1-15 on the season, but are they really any worse than the San Francisco 49ers just because the 49ers had two wins against the equally woeful Los Angeles Rams? Could anyone really make a case that the Chicago Bears or the Jacksonville Jaguars are in a better place than the Browns? Is 3-13 really that different from 1-15?
As 0-2 became 0-4, 0-8 and ultimately 0-14 before the Browns finally won a game, the equally lazy narrative that the analytics approach the Browns were following was “not working.” The implication being that “real teams” don’t waste their time with analytics because they are too busy winning games.
It may be splitting hairs at this point, but the reality is that the Browns were never the worst team in the league this season, nor are they truly one of the worst teams in league history. And while 1-15 puts them in the discussion, they are not even the worst team in franchise history.
Now that the season is over and we have some time before the draft talk goes into full overdrive, let’s dispel those three myths about the 2016 Cleveland Browns.
You don’t have to go very far back in league history to realize there are several teams that were worse off than this year’s Browns.
Thanks to their Week 16 win over the San Diego Chargers, the Browns avoided joining the 2008 Detroit Lions as the only teams to finish a 16-game schedule at 0-16. Those Lions allowed a league-worst 32.3 points per game, which makes the 28.25 points per game the Browns gave up this season look impressive in comparison.
The 2006 Oakland Raiders – just four years after playing in the Super Bowl – scored just 168 points as quarterbacks Andrew Walter and Aaron Brooks combined for six touchdown passes and 21 interceptions. As bad as the Browns offense was this year – especially with Robert Griffin III at quarterback – Cleveland still managed to score almost 100 points more than that Oakland team and had 15 touchdown passes.
The 1980 New Orleans Saints finished at 1-15 while giving up more than 30 points per game, while the 1991 Indianapolis Colts, also a 1-15 team, only scored 143 total points that season.
While fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers would love for everyone to believe the NFL did not exist prior to 1974, the reality is that there have been plenty of bad Steeler teams throughout the years. The 1934 teams went 2-10 while scoring a total of 51 points, while the Steelers were just 6-34-4 from 1938 to 1941 while averaging eight points a game.
The 1965 team (2-12 while giving up 28.3 points per game) and the 1969 team (1-13 while giving up 29 points per game) are also in the running.
Even the New England Patriots have skeletons in their closet, most notably the 1990 edition that went 1-15 and finishing at the bottom of the league in offense after averaging just 11.3 points per game.
But any discussion about the worst team in the NFL begins and ends with the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Along the way to an 0-14 record the Buccaneers were shut out five times, averaged less than nine points a game and lost by an average of 20 points per game. Steve Spurrier was the team’s quarterback and he finished the year with just seven touchdown passes and a long pass of 38 yards.
Tampa’s losing streak would extend through the first 12 games of the following season, but they were in the NFC Championship Game just two seasons later, so take heart Browns fans – there really can be a light at the end of the tunnel.
As the weeks went by and the losses continued to mount, the team the 2016 Browns were most compared to were the 1975 squad that started 0-9 on its way to a 3-13 finish under first-year head coach Forrest Gregg.
But as we are learning here, not all teams are created equal.
The 1975 Browns were in the dying days of the team’s dynasty years and were in the opening stages of rebuilding the roster. They were led by quarterback Mike Phipps, who threw 19 interceptions against just four touchdowns while making 11 starts.
The defense was led by an aging Walter Johnson – playing in his penultimate season – and Jerry Sherk, but featured a secondary populated with the immortal Tony Peters, Van Green and Neal Craig. (Thom Darden missed the year with a broken leg.)
The one thing the 1975 team had, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, was a franchise quarterback in Brian Sipe.
The 2000 team earns consideration as well as they finished at 3-13 after losing 12 of their final 13 games. As much as people like to complain about the current offensive line there isn’t a single player from the 2000 line that would step on the field for the current Browns, and outside of Courtney Brown and Jamir Miller, you wouldn’t see any defensive players either.
The poor offense and defense combined that season to set a franchise record by being outscored by 258 points.
But the team that should rightfully take its place as the worst in franchise history is Bud Carson’s 1990 team that finished 3-13. That squad was shutout three times by the scores of 34-0, 42-0 and 35-0, and lost 13 of its final 15 games.
More importantly, the roster was filled with numerous players who, while still popular, were nearing the end of the line in Cleveland.
And that is the bigger point when it comes to the current edition of the Browns.
The Browns were bad this year as they finished at or near the bottom in just about every offensive and defensive category imaginable. But they also did that with a roster loaded with first- and second-year players, many of whom saw considerable playing time.
This isn’t to argue that the Browns were good this year, 1-15 is still 1-15 after all, but rather to highlight that not all bad teams are created equally. Being bad with an overwhelmed head coach and a roster full of aging players that quit on the team is far worse than the situation the Browns find themselves in currently.
The Browns have a coach that the players believe in, the team never quit during the season even though they had plenty of opportunities to do so, and they are set up with draft picks and cap space to continue adding talent to the roster.
Which brings us to our final point.
Almost from the moment that owner Jimmy Haslam announced a new front office structure that would use “analytics” to rebuild the franchise the critics came out in full force.
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“They don’t have proven football men,” the skeptics cried. “They are going to use spreadsheets to pick players,” they bleated. “Real men build football teams, not computers,” they shouted.
And as the losses mounted it only gave the critics more to whine about.
We get it: people fear what they don’t understand. Or, more accurately, what they choose to not understand. But here’s the truth:
What the Browns are doing is not new to the NFL and it is certainly not revolutionary.
It may not have carried the label of analytics, but Paul Brown certainly used analytics in building the dynasty Browns of the 1940s and 1950s. Tom Landry did the same thing with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1960s and 1970s as the team used detailed computer analysis to draft players and build its roster. Fans who are old enough will certainly remember people criticizing the Cowboys as being “the IBM of the league” for their ways.
We could be wrong, but Brown and Landry seemed to do all right with incorporating analytics into their franchises.
While Brown and Landry may be ancient history to today’s generation of fans, a five-minute Google search reveals that analytics are prevalent in today’s NFL:
- Falcons making modern analytics a priority in 2016
- Why the Steelers hired a Carnegie Mellon professor for advanced analytics (And he’s a graduate of Harvard!)
- The Packers (and the rest of the NFL) are already using Moneyball tactics
- What the Seattle Seahawks can teach us about analytics success
- Broncos among the first team to embrace in-game analytics
- Tacking Tech: What’s new in sports analytics – the NFL and beyond (Key phrase from that article: You may not find a bigger believer in data and analytics than New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.)
So let’s review: the Atlanta Falcons, Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos and New England Patriots – all Super Bowl winners with the exception of the Falcons, who are in the playoffs this year – all use analytics to build their franchises and to better understand in-game strategies.
Remember, though, “analytics are for losers.”
This isn’t to say that the latest approach from the Browns will guarantee that the team will succeed. Making a plan is always the easiest part, executing the plan is always more difficult, especially if people are not given the time.
But to simply dismiss what the Browns are doing without attempting at least a minimal amount of research is, at best, lazy; at worst it is just basic ignorance of what is happening around the league.
Next: Browns hope to resign Pryor, Collins
The Browns still have considerable work to do in this latest rebuilding effort and the entire process could still blow up in their faces. (Or Haslam could blow it up for them.)
But there is more to this current Browns team than just its record, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.