Cleveland Browns bye week report cards: Secondary

Karl Joseph – C

Karl Joseph was a first-round pick in 2016 and has been a solid player throughout his career in between injuries. He’s a box safety who likes to provide a physical presence in run support, but was played out of position over the past few seasons as a free safety. Unfortunately, the same thing is happening this season as Joseph has played twice as many snaps at free safety as he has in the box, and has struggled because of it.

Perhaps he’s being used in this way because of how Andrew Sendejo is playing, and Joe Woods feels like he needs to have two deep safeties on every play to make up for that. Joseph is at his best when he’s playing up at the line of scrimmage, and he’s not getting the opportunity to do that very much. Joseph isn’t bad in coverage, but it’s certainly not his strength, especially deep down the field. He missed Weeks 5 and 6 and his playing time the past two games has been very small with the emergence of Ronnie Harrison.

With Woods wanting to eventually play a base dime defense with the Browns, and with the poor play of the team’s linebackers, it would seem to make sense to use Joseph in a moneybacker role, but that just hasn’t happened yet. Like Johnson, Joseph signed for $3.5 million with the intention of turning a solid season in Cleveland into a nice contract with a different team. There’s still time for him to do that, but things aren’t looking too good at this point.