What happened Sunday, and what is wrong with the Browns offense?

The Titans had drives of 6 plays 60 yards, 1 play 80 yards and 4 plays 78 yards all for TD’s. They took a combined 4 minutes 42 seconds.

The Browns went down the field one time against a soft defense allowing the underneath pass and it took 15 plays and 6 minutes to go the 69 yards. And the Titans weren’t even bothered by the 7 points they gave up because it ate almost half a quarter up.

I chose other in the poll because I don’t know what our exact problem is.

I do know a few problems though. (1) The ‘bend but don’t break’ theory on defense hasn’t been working too well. Our defense has broken a few times (80 yd TD, 25 yd run…). I think this could be due to the fact that we are a young team and or the fact that our defensive play calling has been suspect at times. (2) Our QB, OL, WRs and RBs have poor chemistry. This again could be due to a young team, short offseason, and new system. I think our play calling on offense has been fine (just my opinion).
  
The truth is we are still rebuilding, even though we are so tired of the process we like to deny it. Am I the only one that gets the feeling that the FO is treating this season like an extended pre-season just to evaluate where we are as a team and what we are lacking to become a winning team?

IMO this game shows progress in the offfense. Compared to our inability to move the chains with CIN and MIA it showed we can move the ball. The next step is scoring. This was a step back defensively. Lack of pass rush and tackling was atrocious and lazy.

My question, was the TD to Watson an audible? They lined up and then the formation changed which allowed Watson to score easily. Was that play design or did Colt see something and change the formation?

I voted “other” because I think that when it comes down to it, we just don’t have the pieces we need yet. We don’t have a threat in the passing game, we have an old and slow CB, we have a backup playing safety, we have an old and slow guy playing OLB… Add to that we have a rookie HC and a brand new offensive and defensive scheme. There are things that will need to change from game to game- we need to execute better, work on the fundamentals, discipline, etc. Those are week-to-week things. But (as much as it pains this optimist to say it) I think we have some issues that will have to be addressed over time, and we probably won’t look any better than mediocre until those things get taken care of.

… But in the meantime, “mediocre” is a shitload better than what we have been :)

There are a couple of problems I saw with the offense:

No big play threat. It sounds cliche, but we don’t have anyone who scares the defense right now. Combine that with McCoy’s dropoff in accuracy when he has to throw downfield, and we don’t really scare any defense about giving up the big play. We haven’t attacked the deep seams the way we need to.

No timing. You might have heard Rich Gannon talk about this Sunday, and while he was incorrect about some things he was right about this: Colt doesn’t trust his receivers to be in the right place. They are running the man-to-man version of routes against zone and vice versa. This leads to a lot of hitch steps, pump fakes, and holding on to the ball because in our offense you MUST throw during the split second the WR is getting separation. That leads to pressure, throwaways, incompletions, interceptions and sacks.

Getting a good presnap read. The best QBs in the league alternate between quick-snapping the defense/catching them out of position and getting them to show their hand by using a hard count or cadence. This allows them to get a feel for the coverage, and to adjust protections/hots BEFORE the snap. Colt isn’t doing it. Sometimes he’s going to (what I would think is) the wrong side with his read because he is confused by the coverage.

But when I look back at the numbers I still find it hard to understand how / why we lost this game so badly.

I think the problem with this (what you’re saying in this specific statement quoted) is that you’re only looking at the stats. If you rewatch the whole game, as torturous as that might be, I think you might get a better I idea of why we lost rather than just looking back at stats.

I just watched the 30-minute replay on Sunday Ticket. It flies by pretty quick, which may have skewed my perception, but a few things jumped out at me.

- I like Ward in run support, but not so much in coverage.
- I only saw one drop by Hardesty that was inexcusable. The rest were very poor throws (under a lot of pressure) by McCoy and in at least one instance a catch would have resulted in lost yards.
- McCoy’s chemistry with Cribbs and Hillis looked good in that he seemed to be getting the ball to them on time. Probably with Little too, but the timing on his catches didn’t jump out as much to me.
- On a couple of plays I saw Pashos and at least one other OL seem to just give up on their blocks.
- While our pass rush wasn’t great, I saw at least two times where obvious holds were not called and the plays resulted in TN 1st downs.

Maybe it was just the speed of that replay, but the biggest problem for the Browns seemed to be tackling. The offense definitely lacked consistency, but a large part of that seemed to be the result of a really good TN defense. It looks like the offense just needs a little tweaking rather than an overhaul.