Cleveland Browns: 5 worst decisions from Kevin Stefanski
2. Air warfare vs. Steelers
Week 8 of 2021 was the game that made Odell Beckham, Jr. so mad that he jumped the team. However, the plotline is almost the same as the Arizona game, combined with the same strategy as the Green Bay game.
In this case, Kareem Hunt was down and Nick Chubb was coming back from an injury and may not have been quite 100 percent. The Steelers are always tough, but in 2021, they were horrible against the run.
They were the absolute worst against the run, giving up 2,483 yards for the year, or 146.1 yards per game. As a reminder, due to his injuries, Mayfield was quickly becoming one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL by the time they encountered the Steelers. So what did the Browns do? Pass, pass, pass!
The other sub-plot is that Mayfield had stopped trusting OBJ, and was refusing to throw the ball to Chubb as well. That makes it very tough to win games.
Apologists for the Browns coaching staff can rightly argue that the Steelers played a lot of eight-in-the-box alignments, daring them to throw the ball. Don’t the sportswriters at Dawg Pound Daily know that eight-in-the-box is impossible to run against?
The truth is, however, the Steelers did that against everyone, and they still stunk up the joint. The trick is to find out where T.J. Watt is, and run somewhere else. Everybody made yards against the Steelers on the ground, no matter what they did.
Cleveland, however, decided they just had to pass, pass, pass against the Steelers, and they failed, failed, failed to score. D’Ernest Johnson was given the ball only four times, but had 22 yards and a touchdown. That’s 5.5 yards per carry. That’s not so bad, is it? Not good enough to earn additional carries, apparently.
Chubb, who was coming off a calf injury, also had a rib injury versus the Steelers, which may have slowed him down. Perhaps influenced by those two factors, Chubb had only 16 carries for 61 yards, 3.81 yards per carry.
OBJ’s dad didn’t think it was enough. His social media post wasn’t very professional, but he was right.
Still, Stefanski and the coaching staff were loath to use Johnson, for reasons that we fans can only marvel at. What were they waiting for? The guy had 146 rushing yards the previous game. 5.5 yards per carry and a touchdown was okay, wasn’t it? Why not give him more than four carries, particularly, if Chubb wasn’t quite up to par? But no, perhaps Stefanski did not want to start a “halfback controversy” or something.