Top 5 Cleveland Browns storylines to watch in 2020

3. Will the play-calling improve?

This is something that will be front and center throughout the preseason and early on in the 2020 campaign. Cleveland’s play-calling last season was a complete disaster. This was shown early on as Freddie Kitchens dialed up a play-action pass that had all the receivers going deep while they were pinned in their own territory.

Unsurprisingly, Baker Mayfield was met with a lot of pressure and Cameron Wake ended up sacking him for the safety. They also lost Kendall Lamm on the play as he was injured trying to sustain his block. There’s no guarantee the Browns would have been able to win that game had they done better on that drive, but it was still close at the time and the result was defeating.

From there, things continued to digress. Kitchens would stick with the deep passing plays when they weren’t working and he would take the ball out of Nick Chubb‘s hands when he was rolling to throw it deep again. Time and time again, this strategy failed and caused the defense to return to the field tired after getting no rest on a three-and-out.

No one expected this after the way Kitchens called plays in 2018, which is why we need to see Kevin Stefanski in action before we can buy in. Yes, he was great for Minnesota last season as their offensive coordinator. He started out running the ball like crazy but as the season progressed, he opened up the passing game and the Vikings were a solid offense.

Doing this as a coordinator is one thing, but it’s much harder as the head coach — as Kitchens showed us. Hopefully Stefanski can lean on his assistants and get the help he needs to be successful in this area. We can say it can’t be worse than 2019, but we need to see how much better it can be before we breathe easy.