“Bengals running back Cedric Benson said ‘the play is designed to catch them napping and we caught them napping.’”
Sleepy.
And all we can really do this morning is hand it to the Browns press. If they’ve been telling us anything at all since camp opened, it’s that Pat Shurmur is the exact opposite of Eric Mangini. Whatever else you can say about what the Browns would have looked like yesterday if they’d been kicking off year three of the Mangini regime, one thing the Browns never did under the former coach was lose as 6-plus favorites. In fact, the Browns only lost as favorites once under Mangini (when the Seneca Wallace-led Cleveland team amazingly weighed in as two-point chalk to the eventual AFC West champion Chiefs in Week 2 last season), which is water long under the bridge now, of course. So how many more points would the Browns have been favored by if we’d known in advance that Bruce Gradkowski would be taking the snaps for the Bengals in the second half?
Who knows, but we’re marking our calendar hard for October 23, because after going down to the Niners yesterday (who were 1-15 in converting third downs), the Seahawks are the only other team in the discussion for “who lost to the worst team in Week 1.” We can at least feel better that Seattle had 11 penalties for 72 yards exactly like the Browns did, and the Niners racked up 102 penalty yards on just nine flags themselves. (Efficient!) But the Seahawks lost on the road, not to a team that replaced their starting rookie quarterback with Bruce Gradowkski, and not on a grade school pee-wee league trick, so we have to call the Browns the affirmative leaders of the Suck for Luck sweepstakes after Week 2.
Of course, after taking a 34-7 thrashing at the hands of the Texans, the Peyton Manning-less Colts are frontrunners as well, and the Browns really couldn’t ask for a better team to try to bounce back against next week (as much as folks in Indy are probably saying the same thing about the Colts).
Shurmur said the Bengals cheated on the winning touchdown pass; that he didn’t call a timeout “because [he] didn’t anticipate that the ball was going to get snapped.” The coach added that “my understanding is when the offense changes personnel, the defense is allowed to do so as well and have time to do it. We’ll all see if that actually happened.” As much as it won’t change the outcome, we can only hope Shurmur is right, or the finger pointing comes off as an especially bad look. But either way, couldn’t he have thrown a challenge flag wouldn’t the replay officials have caught it in their mandatory review? Wouldn’t that be exactly what they’d have been looking for on a play like that?
Soooo sleeeeeepy ...
Anyway, the Bengals defense really didn’t look terrible (the defensive line looked stout, long and athletic, and Leon Hall, Nate Clements, Chris Crocker and Reggie Nelson really isn’t a shoddy secondary), but both Browns touchdowns came as a result of long passes on rollouts to wide open receivers (Ben Watson and Mohammed Massaquoi) where Cinci’s coverage was completely blown; probably not a sustainable model for success. Additionally, both of those balls were technically underthrown, though you do want to err on the side of underthrowing when your receiver doesn’t have a man within a mile of him.
D’Qwell Jackson was a monster, with 11 tackles and 2 sacks. Joe Haden turned in a dominating performance as well (assuming the Green catch goes on the coaching staff and not on Joe). Minus the 40-yard Cedric Benson touchdown run that broke the game open, and three or so times when tight end Jermaine Gresham beat T.J. Ward (Tight ends! Still with the Tight ends!), the Bengals really couldn’t get anything going on offense at all, though we’re nervous about what might happen against a team with a non-rookie/non-Gradkowski QB that plays more proficient pitch and catch with the wideouts.
But however underrated(?) the Bengals might have been coming into this one, shortened training camp (why sit the starters in the preseason finale?), rookie head coach, new systems, growing pains, and all that, Bud Shaw has to be right that “the Browns have been overmatched at times and even outcoached before, but never have they looked as disorganized against such a beatable opponent on the day of their unveiling.” Given the history here, we’re talking about a hell of a lot to swallow. It’s a long season, but can we really say that something like yesterday was just what these guys needed to wake them up?
A hell of a lot of bouncing back to do in Indy next week, where the early line has the Browns as 2.5 point favorites.
