The Cleveland Browns got smoked – so what?

With a roster as talented as the Cleveland Browns have these days, fans hungry for wins mistakenly expected this team to be immediate winners. Except Super Bowl teams aren’t cooked up like fast food, they take time.

Two things right up front: First, the way the Cleveland Browns got their Monday Night Football arses handed to them by the 49ers on national television was totally humiliating – to the team, their fans, the head coach, the general manager, the owners…Secondly, so what?

Seriously, who cares? That’s what happens in professional football. Any Given Sunday and all that.

That was a horrible loss caused by too many factors to fix quickly. Blame the excessive penalties and the offensive line and Baker Mayfield’s sudden regression and Odell Beckham’s lack of targets and all those defensive injuries and the inability to stop the run and twice failing to defer to the second half.

Except the main problem with the Browns this season isn’t any of those things (although it’s all of those things and more, of course).

No, the main problem with the 2019 Browns comes down to a simple equation:

Fan Expectations > Team Capabilities

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Some Browns fans expect this young team to be ready already, but that’s impossible.

Think of it like food.

Browns fans (rightly sick of being starved for wins) saw Mayfield and Beckham and Chubb and Garrett and all the other tasty playmakers on the menu and immediately began to expect nothing but victories for dinner. And chances are, given those ingredients, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Except here’s the bad news – the chef isn’t quite finished making the meal just yet.

Admit it – a secret part of every Browns fan thought this team was ready for the Super Bowl already just because most of these players are talented enough to get there. But the team isn’t ready. Not yet.

Or they would have taken care of the lesser Titans in Week 1 and done bigger damage to the wounded Jets in Week 2 and finished off the struggling Rams in Week 3 and they certainly would have put up a more respectable fight against the overconfident 49ers in Week 5.

But they didn’t. Because the Browns aren’t a Super Bowl team. Not yet.

What they are (getting back to the cooking metaphor), are a collection of some of the finest ingredients from the NFL market along with most of the herbs and spices necessary to create a delicious masterpiece but the chef has barely preset the oven and only just started chopping up the onions and garlic.

Cleveland fans have been terribly hungry for years and are so ready to eat right now, and some of them are shocked to find that the inside of their Browns casserole is still a bit frozen.

Reminder: in the Browns’ five-year rebuild plans, this wasn’t the year they were supposed to win the Lombardi Trophy (that’d be next year).

This was the year the Browns chef would finally have enough ingredients to start creating a delicious 16-course meal with postseason desserts, but it most likely won’t be ready to serve until around September of 2020.

Browns fans are hungry to be in the current NFL mix, but it’s going to take most of 2019 (and the next draft class and free agents and trades and preseason) to put the final meal on Cleveland’s impatient table.

It’s frustrating to have to wait, of course (ooh, can you smell what’s cooking in there?), but give the chef and his staff a little more time to pull these Super Bowl Browns out of the oven.

Meantime let’s appreciate the 2-3 hors d’oeuvres they’ve already served up (we would have killed to eat that record a couple of seasons ago) and anticipate even more of those goodies as the 2019 schedule gradually gets easier.

The Cleveland Browns will most likely win many more games this season – they may even shock the Seattle Seahawks at home this Sunday. (By Dorsey, they may even sneak their way into the playoffs this January!) But to expect that of them at this point is like expecting a gourmet restaurant to serve up its delicacies like fast food, and that’s not how Super Bowl teams are created.

Bon Appetit, Browns fans. Just not yet.