The Browns keep piling up wins the hard way, and Quincy Williams made it clear he sees a different team than the one that used to be easy to dismiss.
After Cleveland rallied past the Baltimore Ravens 13-10 on Sunday afternoon, the linebacker told NFL insider Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated that the old label no longer fits.
"We ain’t the same old Browns anymore," Williams told Breer. "At the beginning of the season, we said that."
That message landed after Deshaun Watson delivered his fourth game-winning drive of the season, helping Cleveland improve to 4-2. The Browns have kept scraping out results since a 34-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in Week 1, and Zac Jackson of The Athletic noted the team has been "winning ugly" ever since.
Still, Sunday’s comeback win over Baltimore brought a bigger conversation with it: are the Browns for real, or are they simply surviving week to week?
The numbers say the offense still has a lot to prove. ESPN stats had Cleveland ranked 29th in the league on Monday with an average of 267.5 offensive yards per game. That kind of production leaves plenty of room for doubt, especially if the Browns are going to stay in the postseason race over the second half of the season.
But Williams wasn’t talking like a player worried about outside noise. He framed the Ravens game as a fight to protect what Cleveland already had.
"Man, we number one," Williams said about the first-place Browns currently having tiebreaker advantages over the 4-2 Ravens and the 4-2 Pittsburgh Steelers." Listen, we number one.
We knew that they were coming in here to take our number one spot. We said, 'Think about it, somebody trying to run up in your house and take your favorite trophy.
They can’t get it.' So that was our mindset going into the game, going in the half, coming out of the half: 'Hey, man, they in our house and they trying to take something.
So let’s ride.'"
Todd Monken’s message earlier this season has clearly stuck with the locker room. Back in September, the first-year Cleveland head coach responded passionately to former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and made it known the Browns were no longer "going to Browns" under his watch.
Now Cleveland gets a chance to keep backing up that attitude on Oct. 25 against the 1-5 Tennessee Titans. Since the Browns returned to the NFL in 1999, they have just one playoff victory, but that history doesn’t seem to be shaping the mood inside the building. As of Monday afternoon, DraftKings Sportsbook listed Cleveland as a 1.5-point road favorite.
In Other News...
Ravens Offense Hit A Wall And Declan Doyle Owns The Debate
Without Lamar Jackson, rookie offensive coordinator Declan Doyle had to navigate a familiar kind of Baltimore test against Cleveland: protect a battered offense, keep the run game alive and find enough answers for a quarterback room under strain. The Ravens did enough early to stay in the game, but the attack never found a lasting rhythm, and the Browns were able to bottle up the rushing effort in a 13-10 loss that left the play-calling choices under the microscope.
Doyles first real NFL crisis came with the sort of limitations that can make an offense feel like it is working uphill on every snap, especially with the line struggling to hold up. There were chances to vary the ground game and stress Cleveland in different ways, but the sequence of plays never really opened the door wide enough for Baltimore to escape its own stall, and the result was a reminder that the Ravens offense still has a long way to go before it can operate cleanly without its star quarterback. [Read more 🡒]
Browns Rookie Drew Praise After Helping Flip Ravens Loss
Carson Schwesinger was one of the quieter reasons the Browns were able to hang around long enough to beat the Ravens, but his impact showed up everywhere on the stat sheet and in the tone of the defense. The rookie linebacker finished with a game-high 13 tackles and added a forced fumble in Clevelands 13-10 win, the kind of all-around effort that can shape a tight AFC North game when every possession feels loaded.
Jared Verse singled out Schwesinger afterward for the way he kept playing through the kind of setback that often pulls young defenders out of the rotation. For Baltimore, it was one more reminder of how quickly a game can tilt when a linebacker is consistently around the ball, especially when a turnover turns into points and changes the entire feel of the fourth quarter. [Read more 🡒]
Ravens Suddenly Need Cam Jurgens More Than Ever Against Bengals
Baltimores offensive line issues have been building for weeks, and the middle of the unit has been hit especially hard. The Ravens traded for Cam Jurgens from Philadelphia to help stabilize things, but he has spent the past two weeks out with a concussion, leaving the team to keep patching together the interior while the injuries pile up around him.
With Cincinnati next on the schedule, Jurgens suddenly looms as a more important piece than he did when the deal was made. A healthy return would give Baltimore a cleaner answer in the middle and ease some of the strain on a line that has already had trouble holding up, which is exactly the sort of boost the Ravens need heading into a division game. [Read more 🡒]