Browns Defense and Chicken Little

Can't avoid this topic.  I tried.  The Browns defense vs the Falcons was an atrocity.  An abomination.  Horrific.

Fortunately, hundreds of others have covered that, as if it didn't speak for itself.  And yes, I have a whole bunch of corrections to make.

One fan asked Mary K Cabbot: Can the Browns defense really be that bad?  MKC gave an excellent answer.  I have more to add.

No.  It won't be that bad.  The Bucs have a well-established offensive system with elite veteran skill players.  Ray Horton has come back with a new defensive system, which is still in the experimental stage: He's not certain yet what is the ideal combination of personnel and scheme.

The Bucs were fine-tuning what could be a top five offense, while the Browns are still under construction.  Note: Yes I said a potential top five offense.  Grossi please update your files.

Some pundits continue with the lack of talent mantra.  I prefer to t h i n k.

There are real issues at cornerback, aside from Joe Haden.  Even Haden was overmatched by the sheer size and height of Jackson and Evans.  They really needed Gilbert to emerge.  He played better this time, but not well enough.

Peter Smith spells the secondary issues out quite well.  He is wrong when he calls moving Desir to safety a dumb move, since Desir lacks ideal cornerback speed, and is better suited to safety.  That's also an oversimplification in a Horton defense: The fifth or sixth defensive back is often a coverage safety; really a big zone corner.  Desir may be put back at cornerback now.  Horton may run more zone than man.  This remains unsettled.

But aside from that, Peter as usual did some great analysis.

But the coverage wasn't quite as bad as it looked.  First unit pressure on Jameious Winston was non-existent, and the majority of those long completions came after Winston had a picnic lunch, refilled his cooler, and looked for an open receiver.

This was the abominably horrific part.  Every Browns passrusher was locked up and stoned on nearly every single down.

They did pretty well against the run, and may have two-gapped on early downs.  They didn't blitze a lot.  For all that, the Falcons protectors just took their lunch money.  Nobody, including Darryl Revis, can cover huge wide receivers for five-plus seconds.  Nobody.

I haven't heard much from Paul Kruger, and it may be that he didn't play much.  Horton knows who Kruger is, and Kruger knows this system.  Hassan and Ogbah are rookies.  Orchard enters his second season.  Mingo was traded, so aside from Kruger, all the outside passrushers are inexperienced.

But there is plenty of front seven talent on this defense.  The majority of them are at or near the low end of their growth curves.

The projected inside linebackers and Paul Kruger are veterans, along with Jamie Meder.  The rest of them max out at one year of experience, in a different system.

Ray Horton, as he himself said, deliberately threw everybody in the deep end by hitting them with his whole playbook on day one.  In addition to finding out who would drown, this was also in order to test the various players at different positions and in different alignments to get a comprehensive assessment.

The players' first team reps were diluted.

Terry Pluto expects Ray to simplify and stabilize the defense once he knows what he has, and what works best.

The cornerback situation isn't too great, and coverage hasn't been affected nearly as much by Horton's deep water approach as the pass rush.  

The defense WILL NOT continue to suck like it did in Tampa.  It should "improve" dramaticly vs. the Iggles in game one.

It may still be below average, or even pretty bad early on.  All I'm saying is that whoever wrote, after the third preseason game, against the Bucs offense, in a new system, with inexperienced players, that the 2016 Browns defense has a chance to be the worst in NFL history is in dire need of a brain transplant.

Hue Jackson must have read this blog.  He said "the sky isn't falling".  And it isn't.