The Best Part Of The Browns Win Over The Ravens Was That It Didn't Feel Like Work

Football can be fun when you don't have to justify your fandom

Aaaannnnnnnd we’re back! Yes, I know it was a 2-week hiatus, but as much as I’d like to write for a living, I have to pay the bills somehow, and when they day-job calls, you have to answer.

My wife and went to the Browns game against the Ravens on Sunday. The weather was great, the crowd was rocking, and the extra perks of club access and great seats made it a perfect Sunday. It made me miss having season tickets and all the things that come with it - the anticipation of kickoff, the momentum swings throughout the game, and the joy of celebrating a victory with 65,000 friends.

The vibes were strong on Sunday and a collective feeling of relief came over the stadium after the win over Baltimore. The Browns finally ended a 5-game losing streak, won their first game at home of the season, and the defense was able to hold off any crazy Lamar Jackson heroics late in the game. And on top of it all, fans could have some fun rooting for this team again. That thought wouldn’t leave my head after Sunday, that it was straight-up fun to be in the building and watch my team in person. And I think it has to do with the quarterback.

Jameis Winston is the 39th person to start a game for the Cleveland Browns since returning to the league in 1999. He may be the goofiest of them all, and he sure isn’t afraid to throw the ball around the field. Winston was dealing on Sunday and threw for 3 touchdowns and 349 yards, and he nearly threw 3 interceptions. It was the full Jameis Winston experience. This is the same guy who threw 30 touchdowns and 30 interceptions in the same season after all. But even if he had thrown the interceptions on Sunday, everyone would have been ok. Because Winston, like Joe Flacco last year, is playing without anything to lose, which is a good sign for Browns fans. He genuinely seems happy to be here and is grateful for an opportunity to start games in the NFL. It’s a much different feeling than what we all saw week in and week out with Deshaun Watson.

Ever since the Browns traded for Deshaun Watson in 2022, there has been tension over this team. A tension to prove that signing Watson to a guaranteed contract after his season sitting out and numerous lawsuits could pay off. There was tension in designing a roster and an offensive scheme that could make it easy for him to succeed. This whole experiment had to work, or the organization would waste precious years of their best players’ careers. You could feel the pressure with every snap that Watson played. Every play looked like a do-or-die scenario. He made clean pockets look like he was being pressured from all angles. Every snapshot of him on the sideline looked intense. And the team was struggling.

I know winning football games in the NFL is hard, but it has been an absolute slog to show up week in and out to root for this team with Watson as the quarterback. Fans have had the terrible burden of justifying the monumental price tag the Browns paid for Watson, along with his off-the-field actions and his on-field shortcomings during his entire run in Cleveland. Watson has been unreliable and unwatchable on the field while being unlikeable (to say the least) off of it. And because of it, the fans have been held hostage, having to deal with everyone outside of the city thinking that they are somehow complicit in this whole scheme when in reality they just want to zone out and root for the football team they love. All of us were Browns fans before Watson got here, and we will be fans long after he leaves, yet none of that seemed to matter.

The burden was beginning to be too much this season. Watson had yet to pass for over 300 yards in a game since he joined the Browns. He ranked near the bottom tier of NFL quarterbacks this year, and even lower on the list of Browns quarterbacks that came before him. Yet the expectations placed upon him were laughably low. Because of the roster, the Browns just needed him to be average. All anyone was asking was for him to throw the ball more than 10 yards down the field occasionally, and not make every play look chaotic. All he needed to do was manage games. But $230 million doesn’t go as far as it used to I guess.

Throughout the first 7 weeks of the season, we all thought the same thing: Jameis can’t be worse than this. Why not give the guy a shot? But the organization refused to let up. They doubled down on their commitment to Watson. I have to believe this was the directive from ownership, and not head coach Kevin Stefanski. He normally makes one or two questionable decisions a game, but even he had to know it wasn’t working. Even he had to wonder what Winston could offer.

And let’s be clear, it’s never ok to root for a guy getting injured. It’s poor taste, but when he went down in the Bengals game, we all (again) had the same thought - is this nightmare over?

I don’t know if Watson will ever play another game in a Browns uniform, but in the meantime, I’m willing to stick with the answer I got an answer on Sunday. Jameis can do the things that Joe Flacco did last year. He can run an offense. He can throw the ball downfield. He talks to his receivers on the sideline and tries to find holes in the defense to exploit. Those are the little things that teammates and fans need to have confidence in their football team. When the Ravens took the lead with two minutes to go, I strangely had confidence that we would march down the field and score because that’s what NFL quarterbacks do - they find a way to put their team in a position to win.

Jameis isn’t perfect. After 10 years in the league, you are who you are. The interceptions will come, and there will be a game where we all wonder who he was throwing to on a critical down. His goofiness in interviews won’t be as funny when we lose to a division opponent. But we don’t need him to be perfect, we just need him to do his job so we can get back to loving this football team. So far, so good.