The next great descriptive adjective of a Cleveland Browns’ outcome has to be—beautiful loss. Sound stupid? It should. It ranks right down there with one of the all-time football clichés and, in Northeast Ohio, current No. 1 on the Stupid Parade—ugly win. 

Even players resort to the term ugly win to ward off criticism. If something like the Browns’ 22-17 victory over the 3-6-1 Philadelphia Eagles fails to meet anticipated artistic standards, players will haul out the ugly modifier to head off criticism at the pass. Coach Kevin Stefanski did not wait for things to get ugly.

 “There’s no such thing as an ugly win,” he announced after his team advanced its record to 7-3, the first time the Browns have reached that mark since 1994, when they were the Old Browns. “That was a beautiful win for the guys.”

Even if the win did continue the trend of victories coming against teams with losing records—six of its seven—and leave some of the brighter minds in sports journalism scratching their heads as they tried to figure out who and what these Browns are. They should be writing psychoanalysis on a couch and not commentary from a seat in the pressbox. Regardless, Doug Lesmerises is one of better analysts and he’s baffled.

 “Great,” Lesmerises began his commentary for Cleveland.com, “another week without learning much about this Browns team. A win, sure, whatever, but there have been seven of those this season. . . . The wins have been so comparatively plentiful, but are we really that impressed by any single one of them?” Even after he explains the season game by game, victory by victory, Lemerises concludes with yet another version of the question, though more succinct: “Who are these guys?” 

As he ranked the American Football Conference playoff contenders for ESPN, Kevin Seifert, answered, indirectly, Lesmerises’ question: “No matter how they’re winning,” Seifert concluded, “or who they’re beating, the Browns have staked themselves to a decent playoff position as Thanksgiving approaches.” He placed them sixth among seven anticipated playoff qualifiers, ahead of two of the three teams that have beaten the Browns: No. 7 Las Vegas (6-4) and now, deep into a losing U-Turn, Baltimore (6-4).

After so many seasons of failure, particularly those recently guided by the unsteady hands of Hue Jackson and Freddie Kitchens, Browns observers seem unable to accept the victories and not try to put too fine a point on them. They refuse to accept success for fear that it could come crashing down, as it did in the Collapse of ’19 following Myles Garrett’s suspension for bashing Pittsburgh’s Mason Rudolph in the head with Rudolph’s very own helmet. It does not even seem to matter that with the resurrected Garrett once again MIA due to a positive COVID-19 test other Browns found ways to overcome—Sione Takitaki’s 50-yard Pick Six off struggling quarterback Carson Wentz being the best and most important play of his two-year career; reserve Cameron Malveaux recovering a fumble, and defensive end Olivier Vernon reverting to the younger version of himself and doing his Garrett imitation for three sacks, one a safety.

Vernon’s play, his first three-sack game since 2013 when he had a season high 11.5 sacks with the Dolphins, earned recognition from Football Morning in America’s Peter King as one of his Defensive Players of the Week. King was impressed: “The Browns are 7-3, and good teams don’t fold when their best defensive player suddenly is lost for the game.” King, however, was less impressed with quarterback Baker Mayfield.

 “For someone who’s been playing quarterback most of his adolescent and adult life, Baker Mayfield has poor pocket presence,” King scolded. “Waiting, waiting, waiting while the pocket collapsed around him early in the third quarter, Mayfield got the ball stripped by Fletcher Cox; the Eagles recovered inside the 20 and scored the first offensive TD seconds later. Mayfield handed them the touchdown.”

In his weekly NFL roundup column, King included the just Mayfield criticism in a “Week 11: 20 Thoughts” segment. He was not writing a game story or a longer piece on Mayfield but if he had been he might have mentioned, as Steve Doerschuk did in the Akron Beacon Journal, that on his next play after the Philly TD, that Mayfield rolled out (and away from pressure) for a 42-yard strike through the rain to KhaDarel Hodge. I wrote an entire post in this blog (Nov. 21, 2020) on the need for offensive imagination. 

More disturbing to those who paid rapt attention to Mayfield’s striking passing accuracy, when it helped him to win the Heisman Trophy at Oklahoma, is the mysterious disappearance of it since his NFL rookie season. He missed on two passes early on, either of which could have meant a touchdown. He underthrew rookie tight end Harrison Bryant and overthrew a wide-open Austin Hooper. These lapses are inexplicable—and too common—for a passer who made his name with and lived on his accuracy. 

“No excuses,” Mayfield told the media. 

None needed. What’s needed is an explanation. It is such moments, though often offset by shining ones, that prompt the sporting pundits and public to focus on the failures rather than the overall success of the season, including how Mayfield is running his team and the manner in which defenders stepped in to fill the void of Garrett’s absence. 

As Lesmerises might put it: Who is that guy? It looks like the Baker Mayfield from the “Hulu Has Live Sports” commercial he does with Saquon Barkley in which he tells us it’s his head on someone else’s body. His team may be 7-3 but sometimes he looks like a quarterback whose body has been attached to a scattergun arm and scatterbrained noggin. It’s weird and makes it difficult to appreciate how good this season should feel.