During the 2024 season, the Cleveland Browns added Mike Vrabel to their staff as a coaching and personnel consultant. The Browns served as a bridge to Vrabel’s next job with the New England Patriots in 2025, and as soon as he arrived in Foxboro, he preached a vision for the team centered upon eliminating “bad football.”
Unfortunately, Vrabel saw plenty of that during his brief stop on Kevin Stefanski’s staff. The Browns’ offense, specifically, was the NFL’s most penalized unit during that 2024 season.
A revolving door of quarterbacks certainly played a major factor. Six different QBs have started games for the Browns since Deshaun Watson’s first Achilles injury in 2024. It has led to obvious continuity issues and a troubling trend that new Browns head coach Todd Monken must find a cure for entering his first training camp: pre-snap penalties.
As Sharp Football Analysis laid out in its preview for the 2026 Browns, pre-snap flags accounted for 45.5 percent of Cleveland’s overall penalties, blowing well past the league average. Those mental miscues tend to snowball, too, as the Browns ranked as the third-most penalized offense in the fourth quarter of games in 2025.
“The primary contributors were false start and delay of game infractions. Those two categories accounted for 68% of Cleveland's pre-snap woes last season.” — Sharp Football Analysis
Pre-snap penalties quietly became the Browns' biggest offensive enemy
This all comes back to Vrabel’s vision of eliminating the controllable mistakes that routinely crush NFL offenses, while taking advantage of opponents’ bad football on a weekly basis. It’s a simple philosophy that helped the Patriots win 14 regular-season games and reach last year’s Super Bowl.
Vrabel also had the luxury of one of the game’s ascending young quarterbacks in Drake Maye. The jury’s obviously still out on the Browns’ current QB room, led by Watson and Shedeur Sanders. But similar to last year’s Patriots, the Browns will enter the 2026 season with a new head coach, a ton of roster turnover, and one of the NFL’s most favorable schedules in terms of travel and opponent winning percentage.
Monken will field a young lineup on offense this year, but he’ll have no excuses. The offense has to be better, and the Browns have invested heavily to make sure it is.
General manager Andrew Berry has been lauded for his moves to overhaul the offensive line. The Browns used eight of their 10 draft picks this year on offensive players. Cleveland’s skill position group has a chance to be dynamic, with premium young talent like Quinshon Judkins, Harold Fannin Jr., KC Concepcion, and Denzel Boston poised for major roles.
But it really comes down to eradicating the exhausting game of musical chairs that has continually stymied the Browns’ offense in recent seasons. Monken was harping on pre-snap penalties and turnovers throughout voluntary spring workouts. How his quarterbacks handle the more competitive landscape of training camp, which includes fully-padded practices and real game prep, should decide the Week 1 starter once and for all.
Not to sound overly simplistic, but the Browns haven’t positioned themselves to make a Patriots-esque run in 2026. They wouldn’t have traded Myles Garrett, the league’s most valuable defensive player who's still in his prime, had that truly been the case.
The quarterback competition that could grip the NFL this summer may end up being less about game-breaking upside and more about getting in and out of the huddle, setting protections, and making sure everyone’s on the same page with the cadence and snap count.
Eliminating the bad pre-snap football that Browns fans have been subjected to for far too long could easily end up defining Monken’s first season (for the better).
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