It was a rough opening week for the Cleveland Browns, but buried inside the mess was something worth circling: two rookie offensive linemen looked ready to matter right away.
Austin Barber and Spencer Fano both walked into their first NFL game and came out with their stock intact. Todd Monken was enthusiastic about both, saying they’d be great for a long time. That might sound like standard coach talk, but the film and the numbers line up with the praise.
Fano got the tougher assignment of the two, spending most of the season opener matched up with Josh Hines-Allen against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Pro Football Focus gave him a 59.8 pass-blocking grade, but it did not charge him with allowing a sack or a quarterback hit.
For a rookie taken No. 9 overall, the standard is high, especially when he’s protecting the blind side. Even so, he handled the job well enough, and it’s difficult to fully judge an offensive lineman when the quarterback play around him is shaky.
Barber’s debut may have been even more encouraging. He entered camp as a swing tackle, then shifted to right guard and got pushed into action in Week 1 because of Teven Jenkins’ back injury.
Barber answered with an elite 82.6 PFF grade and allowed just one pressure on 51 snaps. The running game never really got rolling, but that had a lot to do with the game script.
Barber still showed he could move defenders and get to the second level as a run blocker.
The bigger picture on the Browns’ line is more favorable than the five sacks on Deshaun Watson suggest. The raw stat line makes the protection look worse than it was, but the advanced numbers tell a different story.
ESPN’s blocking metrics had Cleveland tied for third in pass-block win rate and seventh in run-block win rate. Per Daniel Oyefusi, those figures track how often an offensive line can hold its block for at least 2.5 seconds, and by that measure the Browns did their job.
PFF agreed, charging none of the Browns’ offensive linemen with a sack and placing all five on Watson.
There’s plenty to criticize after Week 1, and most of it starts with the quarterback situation. But for all the gloom, Barber and Fano gave Cleveland a reason to think the offensive line overhaul already has two real building blocks.
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