Fumbling Mayfield puts Browns in playoff pickle
- Tom Rife: Livin' the Team
- December 31, 2020
- 925
Wouldn’t ya know? One of my New Year’s resolutions had to be broken even before the big ball dropped in Times Square and Ryan Seacrest put the finishing touches on the contemptible year known as 2020.
The vow (my timing was dreadful) was to not be so hard on Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield in 2021. It seemed fitting to give good ol’ No. 6 a little breathing room. He’d been playing at a high level for several weeks, and had he not, the team would have been in no position to even mention the word “playoffs.”
Then along came the moribund (now 2-13) New York Jets, whose 23-16 victory over the Brownies this past Sunday made Cleveland’s path to the playoffs more troubling. Mayfield fumbled the ball three times, two of which came on critical drives in the fourth quarter.
Who else out there in reader land wanted to throw a shoe at the TV screen? C’mon, man!
“Playoffs? Playoffs?”
Now Cleveland’s season of resurgence under new head coach Kevin Stefanski boils down to this Sunday’s home showdown against the despised Pittsburgh Steelers, who are locked into the postseason. Win, and the Browns are in. Lose, and believe it or not, Baker’s Boys are not necessarily eliminated, but among other far-fetched possibilities, the Colts will have to tie or lose to the 1-14 Jaguars.
One word of warning: Don’t look for Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin to rest his starters. After Sunday’s come-from-behind victory, he was quoted as saying, “There’s a fine line between drinking wine and crushing grapes.”
Interpret that any way you wish. Everyone knows Tomlin abhors losing — especially to Myles Garrett, whose Browns are trying to make the playoffs for the first time since 2002, the NFL’s longest postseason famine.
Give Mayfield credit for owning up to his wonky performance against the “J-E-T-S Jets!” He put the loss squarely on his shoulders, making no excuses.
“Plain and simple, I have to hold onto the damn ball,” he said during his two-minute video remarks to the media. “We had exactly what we needed to win this game. And I didn’t do good enough. That’s it.”
Of course, because of contact tracing from a player testing positive for COVID-19, the Browns (10-5) did play without the services of their top-four wide receivers, calling upon practice-squad backups to answer the last-minute challenge.
Oh, by the way, do you realize Cleveland also took the MetLife Stadium field without two starting offensive linemen and missing a pair of starting linebackers?
Still, they could have won had Mayfield’s fried chicken not been so finger-lickin’ good.
So much for New Year’s resolutions. It’s time to shift gears:
No doubt there are oodles of Dawg-Pounders questioning the NFL for making the Browns play with such depleted ranks. Thinking back to that earlier Packers-Ravens contest that was postponed three times before it finally happened, was the league’s inconsistency exposed?
In case you missed the explanation, the NFL did have some terra-firma on which to stand.
For one thing, we’re now facing Week 17. Had the Browns vs. Jets been postponed, when could it have possibly been rescheduled?
That’s not, however, the real reason why CLE vs. NYJ went on as scheduled, despite the developments of late Saturday night.
All along in this season of unpredictability and flexibility, the NFL has stated that by no means would games be postponed for the sake of competitive balance. Instead, the determining factor had to be related to the overall health and well-being of players, coaches and all others involved.
In the Pittsburgh-Baltimore case, the NFL called for the repeated postponements because, upon the league’s investigations of the ongoing coronavirus spread, it did not feel the situation was fully contained.
In the Browns’ case, however, the league concluded that because all the necessary protocols and procedures had been addressed, there was no further threat to the health and well-being of those left to participate.
As a result, the scheduling of last Sunday’s game was all above-board and consistent with NFL policies.
So please, don’t throw any more shoes at the TV — or the commissioner (this time).