EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It feels hopelessly over. The season. The Kevin Stefanski-Andrew Berry-Paul DePodesta-Deshaun Watson era. The desperate and puzzling Dillon Gabriel experiment.
All of it. And not just the parts that were predictably sunk by the failure of the Watson trade and this year’s round of musical quarterback chairs. Losing was expected this season, and embraced to a point.
The punchless offense has been predictably bad since early September. But losing to the New York Jets (2-7) the way the Browns (2-7) did Sunday — with a flurry of penalty flags, long special team touchdowns by New York and short-yardage misses — seemed to reinforce that this whole operation is more of a construction project going awkwardly quiet than any functional rebuild.
In the big picture, it was a good day for the Browns’ potential 2026 draft positioning, given that the Jets, Miami Dolphins and New Orleans Saints all somehow won. It was a bad day for the folks currently running the Browns and their chances of surviving another miserable season. The Browns fell to the Jets 27-20, by way of two special teams touchdowns and a whole bunch of seemingly avoidable mistakes, which reinforces the team’s reality: for a season and a half now, the Browns have gone nowhere but backward.
That the Cleveland offense actually appeared semi-functional for stretches of Sunday’s game didn’t matter, mainly because the Browns didn’t sustain much over the final three quarters. The Myles Garrett-led defense has been exceptional at times, and mostly dominated the Jets. But the home team entered the fourth quarter with zero net passing yards yet took the lead for good on a well-timed screen pass from Justin Fields to Breece Hall, who found daylight on a cutback and went 42 yards to the end zone.
The Browns tried to answer and got into Jets’ territory, but a fourth-down blitz off the edge by New York forced Gabriel to try to step up in the pocket. Jets defensive end Will McDonald was waiting, and though he had four sacks, none was more important than that one. Hall rushed for 30 yards on the next play, and the Jets soon after got a field goal to make it a two-score game.
Some numbers could quickly explain why the Browns lost despite outgaining the Jets 278-169, including, obviously, the six sacks absorbed by Gabriel, the Browns’ 10 penalties and them running 70 plays to amass those 278 yards. The Browns entered the game with the league’s lowest average yards per play at 4.1, then it went even lower in a winnable game against a bad Jets defense that traded its two best players, Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams, ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline.
But the story — and the reason this one feels more egregious than other losses — was more about the flow of the game. Despite their defense dominating, the Browns never got breathing room. The Jets got a 99-yard kickoff return from Kene Nwangwu to immediately answer the Browns’ 95-yard scoring drive in the first quarter. Cleveland then went three-and-out, and Isaiah Williams took the ensuing punt 74 yards to the end zone.
These were not hidden return yards that sometimes subtly swing games. These were huge, game-changing plays that gave the Jets a chance to overcome their offensive struggles.
“We’re going to win as a team and lose as a team, so we will all own that, including myself,” Stefanski said of the special teams touchdowns. “We just didn’t do a good enough job in any facet. We’ll just keep swinging.”
Now that the official midway point of the season can be marked by another bad offensive showing and a loss to a Jets team that entered the game with one win, it’s fair to wonder how many swings this group has.
DePodesta is leaving. He was at Sunday’s game but has accepted a job as head of MLB’s Colorado Rockies. And though team owner Jimmy Haslam has said publicly that he supports Berry and Stefanski, losses like this one make it fair to wonder whether DePodesta’s exit clears the runway for a complete overhaul after the next eight games.
Certainly, the plan and the play at quarterback don’t inspire much hope. Gabriel finished 17-of-32 for 167 yards and two touchdowns. The rookie had some good moments but remained erratic and was under constant pressure. For every good throw Gabriel makes, there seems to be a wild miss.
Stefanski said after the game that the Browns will stick with Gabriel going forward, but a switch has to be looming relatively soon unless the offensive results change. And there’s no evidence, anywhere, that a turnaround is coming. Though Stefanski rarely gives direct answers, his reluctance to bench Gabriel for Shedeur Sanders probably reflects his lack of confidence in Sanders.
Cleveland had never previously allowed an opponent to post two return touchdowns in the same game, much less the same quarter. But the Jets got two return touchdowns in a span of 36 seconds, and that allowed New York to continually fail on offense without maximum penalty before catching the uber-aggressive Browns in a zero-blitz at the right time on the screen pass that put them in positive pass yardage.
The Jets didn’t even get over 20 total yards until Hall had a 22-yard run a little more than five minutes into the second quarter, yet they had the lead. They won despite recording just four first downs over the game’s first 43 minutes.
The failed fourth-down try with a little over 10 minutes left spelled doom for the Browns. On a day the offense showed noticeable yet inconsistent improvement in some areas with new play caller Tommy Rees getting Gabriel out of the pocket and forcing the ball to Jerry Jeudy, who finished with a season-high six receptions for 78 yards and a touchdown, the misses still loomed large.
Down by a touchdown in the closing minutes, the Cleveland offense might have gotten one more chance. But Devin Bush was flagged for defensive holding on a third-and-16.
Cameron Thomas jumped offside ahead of a fourth-and-5 play the Jets likely weren’t going to run with 58 seconds left. The Browns probably weren’t going to be able to drive 70-plus yards in around 90 seconds to either tie the game or give themselves a chance to win, but the mind-numbing penalties took any hypothetical last-second heroics out of the storyline.
Though the Browns successfully ran their field goal team on to beat the buzzer and tie the game at 17 in the final seconds of the first half, even that pre-field goal sequence ended with two bad incompletions by Gabriel and a sack.
The Browns had the ball twice in the third quarter and punted twice. They would have crossed the 50 to start the half before a 15-yard tripping penalty on Jack Conklin derailed them.
Great offenses share the wealth. The Browns share the mess, with all three units racking up penalties and miscues at inopportune times. After the Jets’ two touchdown returns in the first quarter, it was almost fitting that the second half started with Browns rookie Adin Huntington getting a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.
There’s no excuse for losing to the Jets, who couldn’t complete a pass for most of the day and lost their top receiver, Garrett Wilson, to a second-half knee injury. Hall created explosive plays and was the best player on the field in the second half, so credit the Jets for persistence.
But in a strange game that was probably always going to be ugly even without the wind and second-half rain, the Browns just melted. This was the first loss to include a full special teams meltdown, but familiar themes remained.
And with the offense continually struggling to sustain anything to the point that the defense has to be perfect, the whole thing feels a little too familiar. Mostly, it just feels hopeless.