Cleveland Browns vs. Bengals: Predicting another loss for Hue Jackson

Members of the Dawg Pound Daily crew give their predictions for the Cleveland Browns Week 12 game against the Cincinnati Bengals, a team with a familiar face

It’s the first meeting of the 2018 NFL Season between the Cleveland Browns and AFC North rival Cincinnati Bengals. Adding a little extra juice to this one is the presence of Hue Jackson on the opposite sideline.

After two stints (and serving in multiple assistant roles) with the Bengals, Jackson came to the Browns to be the head coach ahead of the 2016 Season. He promptly went 1-15 that season and followed it up with the second 0-16 season in NFL history.

After blaming everyone but himself, Jackson somehow managed to save his job to start this season. However, eight games in he started to run out of people to blame and his bumbling tenure was over. After an embarrassingly bad media tour, Jackson found himself employed with the Bengals again ‚— thanks to his friendship with Marvin Lewis.

Of course, Lewis may also believe that the former head coach could share some of the Browns secrets as the two teams face off twice (including this coming game). Cleveland players don’t seem to think there’s much merit to that as Baker Mayfield simply said “no” when asked about Hue knowing the offense and then followed that with a “just no” when asked to elaborate.

So the question is whether or not Hue will help the Bengals. Or, could he hurt them as some of the players may want to stick it to the coach who blamed them for every shortcoming the team had the past two and a half seasons.

We try and answer those very questions with our weekly predictions. As always, if you like the writer’s take, click on their name for more of their work.