What will the Cleveland Browns offense look like in 2021?

The Cleveland Browns offense could look quite a bit different in Kevin Stefanski’s second year.

While the Cleveland Browns have focused on terraforming their defense this offseason, the offense has undergone some changes as well, and it had to if this team wants to realize its Super Bowl potential. How could the unit look in 2021, and how will it be different from 2020 in terms of personnel usage, schematic tendencies, and players?

Everything must revolve around fixing what went wrong at the end of last season. The Browns scored a measly 17 points against the Kansas City Chiefs and their vaunted defense.

If you didn’t pick it up, that’s sarcasm; the Chiefs defense is not very good at all, yet Cleveland was unable to do much, despite a masterful performance by Baker Mayfield aside from the one interception. That pick came on the team’s first drive coming out of halftime, and it definitely seemed like Mayfield was pressing at that point, and who can blame him?

That was the first drive out of halftime, after the Chiefs had scored a field goal off of Rashard Higgins‘ game-changing fumble caused by a helmet-to-helmet hit that should have been flagged. Instead of making it a six-point game, Cleveland went into halftime down 19-3.

Mayfield led the team back to make it 22-17 with 11 minutes to go, but nothing happened afterward.

Aside from the fumble, the Browns had plenty of chances to win that game, but self-inflicted mistakes cost them. There is also the hard fact that while 24 points would have been enough to win, that’s almost never going to be enough to beat Patrick Mahomes. And when your defense holds Kansas City to 22 points, you’d better have won that game.

The defense has been overhauled and should be able to put up more of a fight against Chad Henne than they did. But the defense should never have been put in that position in the first place, because the offense should’ve scored more against a defense with one legitimate pass-rushing threat and one threatening player in the secondary.

It was an embarrassing offensive output, and the issues that had plagued the Browns all year finally came to a head because of how the Chiefs played defense, in spite of an overall lack of great talent.

Kansas City sat in cover-1 press-man for most of the game with Daniel Sorenson as the deep safety and their corners playing tight man against Cleveland’s receivers. The Chiefs did this despite knowing full well that Mayfield was playing the best football of his career, because they knew that the Browns receivers wouldn’t be able to generate enough separation, especially downfield, for that to matter.

Mayfield was pinpoint accurate all afternoon, because he had to be; the lack of separation for him was sickening, and he was forced to make tight-window throws on plays that should be routine completions. Donovan Peoples-Jones got open for a long sideline fade (his only target), and both Rashard Higgins and David Njoku had 25-yard-plus receptions, but other than those three plays, Mayfield was forced to work underneath the entire game, and the offense paid dearly for it.

The Chiefs chose to stack the box and take away the Cleveland running game, while theoretically making themselves vulnerable to chunk plays in the passing game. But they knew that despite not having great defensive backs outside of Tyrann Mathieu, that wouldn’t matter because the Browns didn’t have anyone who could reliably get open against man coverage and/or down the field, and they were absolutely correct.

Jarvis Landry’s average depth of target was 3.7 yards. He was targeted 10 times on the day and caught seven passes for 20 yards, in the biggest game of his life, when his team needed him most.

To be fair to Landry, he was placed into a role he should never have been in when Odell Beckham Jr. went down in Week 7. Landry is good at finding soft spots in zone, but is extremely ineffective against man coverage, especially when functioning as his team’s top target on the outside.

Beckham was the only player on the roster who could reliably beat man coverage or get open downfield. With that missing against Kansas City, the Chiefs had absolutely zero fear of getting beat deep, and essentially laughed at the Browns skill players and dared them to get open so that their quarterback, playing at a league-best level, could connect with them. If the Chiefs can do this effectively, imagine how the better secondaries in the league can hamper Cleveland’s offense.

Having Beckham on the field changes pretty much everything. Perhaps it’s not the wisest idea to rely on him given his injury history since 2016, but that is the spot the Browns have placed themselves in.

Even when Mayfield was playing poorly over his first six games, Beckham was getting open constantly, and Mayfield left big play after big play on the field because, frankly, he didn’t know what he was doing at that point. He hadn’t yet adjusted to the Stefanski offense, and really didn’t become fully comfortable until Week 13 against the Tennessee Titans, after which he went on an absolute tear.

If Beckham had played in that game, the Chiefs would have been forced to not only play their corners off him, but also have a safety cheat to his side of the field, which opens up the short and middle area for Landry, Higgins, and the tight ends to operate, not to mention clears up the box for the running backs.

Since entering the league, Mayfield is statistically one of, if not the best deep passers in the NFL, yet the majority of his targets go underneath to players who are draped in coverage and have minimal potential for YAC.  Mayfield is currently shackled by his receiving corps, and it’s a shame because as great as he played towards the end of last season, he could be so much better with receivers who properly complement his skillset. Beckham goes a long way to fixing this issue, but he alone isn’t enough.

Rookie Anthony Schwartz also helps with this. He’s raw (though not to the degree many portray him as), and needs to learn a wider route tree, but the mere threat of his 4.2 speed getting vertical is enough to stretch a defense vertically, not to mention what the provides on jets and drags laterally.

When the Browns want to get vertical, they can run 11 personnel with Beckham, Schwartz, Peoples-Jones, and David Njoku. They did this just 44% of the time last season, which ranked 30th in the NFL. They lead the league in 13 personnel at 14%, which features just one receiver on the field. After Beckham was injured, Peoples-Jones became the lone receiver for these formations, because he provided the most vertical threat.

Cleveland ran plenty of multi-tight end sets, because that’s what Stefanski likes to do. He values the extra in-line blocking and TEs across the league are undervalued relative to what the really good ones can do. The team made Austin Hooper the highest-paid TE in NFL history last offseason and then drafted Harrison Bryant in the fourth round, so they are well-invested at the position.

Hooper didn’t have nearly the type of season that he was expected to, and looked slow and unathletic. Hopefully, he will have a bounceback year, because the lack of downfield ability and dynamism after the catch hampered the offense, especially when sharing the field with Landry, who does the same things at the same level as Hooper.

As the Vikings play-caller in 2019, Stefanski used 11 personnel just 42% of the time. Perhaps this was due to the personnel at his disposal; he had a weak wide receiver depth chart after Stefon Diggs and Adam Thielen, and two quality tight ends in Kyle Rudolph and Irv Smith Jr. But it seems more likely that Stefanski just likes to run multiple tight end sets more than most, which does hamper the explosive ability of the offense.

However, after being promoted to the Vikings offensive coordinator in 2018, Stefanski utilized 11 personnel 60% of the time, as compared to the 70% that John DeFilippo used. This ranked 19th in the league, so it’s still not a ton of usage, but a much more respectable amount than 44%. In hindsight, it was expected to see a decrease given what we now know about Stefanski’s schematic tendencies, but it doesn’t seem unlikely that he will utilize three receivers more often in 2021 given the talent that he now has.

While filling in for the Wild Card game, Alex Van Pelt ran 11 personnel on 54% of the team’s snaps, and Stefanski used it 72% of the time against Kansas City, which may provide a better indicator of what is to come, at least when the Browns aren’t blowing the doors off of teams. 12 and 13 is effective when used properly, and do aid in the running game.

But if teams know you’re going to be running it almost two-thirds of the time, and they aren’t scared of the one or two receivers you put on the field, or of the possibility of three and four-wide sets, then whatever benefits you attempt to derive from the extra tight ends just ends up cramping your offense into a smaller portion of the field, hampering everything at once.

The fact that Stefanski was attempting to integrate punt returner JoJo Natson into the offense (before he suffered a torn ACL) just to add some sort of speed and threat is proof enough that he knew what the team had last year wasn’t cutting it. The additions of Beckham and Schwartz will make Stefanski think long and hard about his personnel groupings and how to make the best used of his talent. He knows where the game is now and where it’s headed; if you want to win, you have to be able to throw the ball.

Cleveland couldn’t do that in their playoff loss despite having a great quarterback. Week 1 provides them an excellent litmus test to prove they’ve acknowledged their 2020 shortcomings and have taken the necessary steps to fix those issues in 2021 before the receiver room undergoes a massive shakeup in 2022.