Browns Nick Chubb a bright spot in a disappointing season

The Cleveland Browns are stumbling toward their bye week having lost four games in a row as they prepare to host the Cincinnati Bengals on Monday Night Football.

One of the brightest spots among the weekly defensive breakdowns and the slow return to form of backup quarterback Jacoby Brissett has been the play of running back Nick Chubb, who continues to excel on a weekly basis and further stake his claim to being the league’s best running back.

Lost a bit in last week’s defeat to the Baltimore Ravens is that Chubb passed Greg Pruitt for fourth on Cleveland’s all-time rushing list. Chubb currently has 5,556 career rushing yards in just 65 games, surpassing Pruitt’s 5,496 rushing yards which he compiled in 118 career games with the Browns.

Related: Where are your former Browns now? RB Greg Pruitt

Chubb now only trails Mike Pruitt (6,540 rushing yards in 124 games), and Pro Football Hall of Famers Leroy Kelly (7,274 yards in 136 games) and Jim Brown (12,312 yards in 118 games) on the franchise’s all-time list. It is conceivable that Chubb could catch Mike Pruitt yet this season as he would need to average 98.4 rushing yards per game the rest of the way.

As for Kelly, if Chubb can maintain his career average of 85.5 rushing yards per game he would need just 20 more games to claim the No. 2 spot on the list.

It is not just Cleveland records that Chubb is raking up as his first-quarter rushing touchdown against the Ravens gave him eight on the season, making Chubb just the fifth running back in league history to record at least eight rushing touchdowns in each of their first five seasons, according to clevelandbrowns.com. The others? Jim Brown, Emmit Smith, LaDainian Tomlinson and Adrian Peterson, which is a pretty impressive group to be a part of.

Chubb heads into this week’s game against the Bengals sitting at No. 1 in the league in rushing yards with 740, tops in rushing touchdowns with the aforementioned eight, tops in runs of more than 20 yards with eight, and second in runs that produced a first down with 34.

In seven career games against the Bengals, Chubb has 662 rushing yards, having surpassed 100 yards four times, averaged 5.52 yards per carry and scored five rushing touchdowns while adding a receiving touchdown for good measure.