Cleveland punted once: inside a 35-7 in Jacksonville, and the eight hours the sport spent explaining it

Corey Bojorquez punted once. Thirty-seven yards, downed inside the Jacksonville 20, and that was the sum total of what the Cleveland Browns gave back on Sunday afternoon. They did not turn the ball over. They did not attempt a field goal, so Andre Szmyt’s afternoon was five extra points. On a field where the temperature ran past a hundred degrees with no wind in a stadium that holds 42,507 this year because the upper deck has been taken out of it, Cleveland rushed for 173 yards on 28 carries, converted eight of eleven third downs, and beat a team that won thirteen games last season 35-7.

What follows is from nine people over three days. Five of them work for the Browns. Three are in Jacksonville, whose beat I do not work, and had no particular reason to pick up. One is a personnel director for an AFC club with nothing at stake in either building. Most spoke without their names because both organizations would prefer the week be about something else. The Athletic does not staff a Jaguars beat, so the Jacksonville half of this is my own reporting and is thinner than the Cleveland half. A reader should weigh it that way.

By Sunday night the explanation had already arrived and it had not required much assembly. Jacksonville were flat. Jacksonville were priced for regression before the summer ended, by a market that had watched Travis Etienne and Devin Lloyd leave and drawn the obvious conclusion. Trevor Lawrence had a poor day. Cleveland hit two explosive plays inside four minutes of the second quarter and rode them. It is one game, in September, on the road, against an opponent whose mind was somewhere in October. Every one of those sentences is defensible, several of them are true, and the people saying them are not being stupid.

The things that are not in dispute are smaller and duller. Cleveland is 1-0. Five rookies started. One man holds the head coaching job and the general manager’s job at the same time, and there is still no precedent anywhere for undoing that arrangement quickly. $117.6 million of dead money sits on this salary cap and a win does not move a dollar of it. Pittsburgh lost at home 30-3 with a cornerback Cleveland turned into two future first-round picks. None of that tells you whether this football team is any good.

The first quarter

Jacksonville had the ball first and went three and out, which four people brought up unprompted and none of them thought meant anything at the time. Cleveland then drove the length of the field without much visible effort and scored on a four-yard throw to Harold Fannin Jr. with 3:34 left in the quarter. Two Browns assistants described the same thing about that possession, which is that the run game worked on the first attempt and kept working, against a front that finished first in the league against the run last season and has most of the same people in it.

Quinshon Judkins carried it fifteen times for 96 yards and ran through people to get some of them. On the 30-yarder later in the half he threw two stiff arms on one run, which CBS came back to twice and which a Jacksonville defensive coach raised with me on Monday. Dylan Sampson had four for 23. KC Concepcion took four handoffs for 24. Cleveland ran it 28 times for 173 yards, and the afternoon is downstream of that number rather than of anything that happened at receiver.

What this offense did not do is give the ball back. Twenty-two first downs, no turnovers, one punt. The throws went where they were available rather than where a depth chart says they should: Concepcion six catches on six targets for 119 yards, Denzel Boston four for 54, Fannin four for 48, DeAndre Hopkins two for 32, Carsen Ryan two for 23. Jacksonville’s defense was out there long enough that Foyesade Oluokun finished with eleven tackles, three of them for loss, and a sack.

Nine forty-five of the second

Then Jacksonville scored, and the drive was the cleanest football played by anybody all day. Lawrence threw a 66-yard ball to Travis Hunter down the boundary on Darnell Savage, who was stacked at the top of the route and had no help arriving. Bhayshul Tuten broke a long one on the same possession. Lawrence ran it in himself from three yards with 9:45 on the clock and it was 7-7, and Jacksonville had just moved down the field twice in six plays against a defense that showed them one thing and then showed it again.

The people in Cleveland are not pretending otherwise about that stretch, the head coach included, and he volunteered it before I asked. “Seven points is not what that was,” Mansour said on Monday. “There were two drives in the second quarter where we did not know where we were, and the structure that got beaten on each of them is one I like and one I asked Mike for. He calls it. I built what he’s calling out of. If you want to write about the second quarter, write about that and don’t write about who was standing where.”

Cleveland answered with a possession that ended in Fannin running it in from a yard with 6:46 left, which made it 14-7 and which, on the numbers, is the least interesting touchdown of the five. Jacksonville got the ball back and did nothing with it. What happened on the next Cleveland possession is the reason this game is not a 20-17 you have already forgotten.

Third and short

Travis Switzer built a third-and-short sheet in training camp. Three people who have seen it describe the same object: a single tabbed page for third-and-one through third-and-three, five calls on it, four of them passes, put together in the second week of camp and used in practice more than the volume of those situations would suggest. Cleveland did not run a snap from it in August that anybody I spoke to could recall. Two of the five are play-action shots off the same backfield action Judkins had been carrying all afternoon.

On third-and-short in the second quarter, Mansour called the third item on the page. Jacksonville had Concepcion in press with a single defender and nothing over the top of him. He beat the press at the release, which is the part every person I asked about this play mentioned first and in almost the same words, and the ball was in the air before the safety had committed. Fifty-five yards. On the next snap Judkins went 30 for the touchdown with 3:35 on the clock, and Cleveland led 21-7 at a point in the game where Jacksonville had been on the field for a very long time in a hundred degrees.

Two people in Jacksonville told me the press look on that snap was a check made at the line rather than a call sent in, and that it was one of a small number of things their defensive backs were allowed to get to on their own on third-and-short. Neither would go further and I did not push, because I do not work that beat often enough to know whose week I would be ending. Anthony Campanile was not made available. Liam Coen was, briefly. “We didn’t get off the field on third down,” he said. “That’s the game. I’m not going to dress it up for you.”

CBS cut to Mansour on the headset while the ball was still in the air, and by Sunday evening the frame from that cut was on every platform there is. He was asked about it Monday and did not remember doing it. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “I’ve seen it a number of times.”

The line, honestly

Five rookies started, and three of the five men on the offensive line were a rookie center, a rookie right tackle and a guard playing somewhere he has not played much. The line was up and down, and the up parts and the down parts were not evenly distributed among the men responsible for them. The head coach will not go near that. The people who will go near it want their names left off.

Max Iheanachor spent most of the afternoon on Josh Hines-Allen and gave up nothing worth writing down. That is the ninth pick in the draft, taken against every public board in the industry, in his first regular-season game, against the best defender on a thirteen-win team, and the honest summary of it is a sentence with no incident in it. Two Cleveland assistants and one person in Jacksonville said versions of the same thing. Iheanachor himself gave the locker room eight words. “He’s a good player,” he said. “I had help twice.”

The interior was a different afternoon. Cleveland could not get push in short yardage, which is the one place a 6.2-a-carry day was ordinary, and the red-zone trips that produced no points involved being unable to move a defensive tackle backward eighteen inches. Zion Johnson had a hard day in both phases and was responsible for one of the four sacks. Parker Brailsford, a fifth-round rookie starting at center in Week 1, held up better than the round would predict and cannot yet anchor a bull rush.

What the line did do, per three people, is communicate. Calls got out early, the front-side identification on the run game was right more often than a group this new has any business being right, and they were out of the huddle with time on the clock in a stadium where noise was not the problem it would be in a full building. That is the unglamorous reason 28 carries went for 173 yards against the run defense that finished first in the league last season.

Sunday, by side

	CLE	JAX
Total yards	434	218
Yards per play	8.3	5.1
Net passing	261	153
Rushing (att)	173 (28)	65 (23)
First downs	22	10
Third down	8-11	4-10
Fourth down	0-2	1-2
Red zone TDs	4-6	1-3
Sacks allowed (yds)	4 (14)	1 (9)
Turnovers	0	2
Penalties	2	1
Punts	1	—

Twenty of twenty-four

Shedeur Sanders completed twenty of twenty-four for 275 yards with two touchdowns, no interceptions and a rating of 142.2, in his first Week 1 start, a year after a season that finished among the worst statistical quarterback seasons anybody has bothered to index. He also took four sacks for fourteen yards, with an intentional grounding on top of them, and they killed drives in an afternoon where almost nothing else did.

The twenty-of-twenty-four and the four sacks were on the same broadcast, and the sport divided along them at a speed suggesting the positions were written in advance. One camp reaches for twenty-four attempts, the depth of target on most of them, the sacks, Jacksonville. The other has been insufferable since four o’clock Sunday. The version I heard three times from people who evaluate quarterbacks for a living is that he was asked to play point guard and did it without an error, and that on the snap where he was asked for more he delivered that too. Sanders, asked what he saw on the 55: “They were in man. He had one guy. So.”

The sacks are his and the people around him say so without being asked. Two of the four had a receiver open past the sticks at the moment the pocket started to move, and the grounding was a decision made after the play had already gone wrong. “Four sacks is four drives you might not get back,” the AFC personnel director said. “He gets rid of it beautifully when he’s decided to. The ones where he hasn’t decided are the whole file on him, and they were in this game too, on a day he went twenty of twenty-four.”

Seven points

The defense was competent and was helped enormously by an offense that would not surrender possession, and seven points is a flattering way to describe it. Jacksonville reached the red zone three times and scored once. They were 4 of 10 on third down and 1 of 2 on fourth. Lawrence went 15 of 20 for 162 with an interception and was sacked once all afternoon. Cleveland generated fourteen tackles for loss and seven quarterback hits and got home one time, and that sack was split between Isaiah McGuire and Ronnie Hickman.

Jared Verse had seven tackles, three for loss, two hits on the quarterback, a fumble recovery and no sacks, and was the best pass rusher on a field that also had Hines-Allen and Travon Walker on it. He spent most of the fourth quarter talking at the Jacksonville sideline about a game that had stopped being in doubt. Asked afterward whether Jacksonville had been flat, he declined the premise. “They wasn’t flat,” he said. “Don’t put that on them. That’s a good team and we got them today.”

Grant Delpit played his first game as a full-time big slot corner and it was the most interesting football on the roster: nine tackles, a tackle for loss, a quarterback hit, a pass defensed, a forced fumble, in an overhang role people here have described to me since March as the reason Cleveland thought it could move him. Carson Schwesinger had seven tackles, two for loss and a pass defensed with the green dot on his helmet. Mason Graham’s line reads two quarterback hits and nothing else, and three people told me separately that it was a good afternoon for him.

Tyson Campbell intercepted Lawrence in the end zone against the club that traded him away last October, and that was the last thing of consequence Jacksonville did. Delpit, who has now been here longer than anyone else on the roster, was the only defensive player who wanted to talk about the second quarter. “They had ten first downs all day,” he said. “Ten. And the one drive they scored on, that was us, and I’m in that, I’m not sitting up here talking about somebody else’s afternoon.”

Which brings this to Darnell Savage, who moved from safety to boundary corner in the last two weeks of August and had a Sunday both camps have already taken their preferred half of. He was beaten for the 66 to Hunter, and Brian Thomas Jr. and Jakobi Meyers converted third downs against him. He also produced two pass breakups that were better football than anything else the secondary did, one on a throw that was going to be a touchdown. Mansour was asked about it Monday, declined in one sentence, warmly, the way he declines all of them, and then talked for a while about Brandon Lynch putting Savage outside in the second week of July. The beat has stopped being surprised by that.

Two fourth downs

Cleveland went 0 for 2 on fourth down and did not attempt a field goal at any point, which are related facts. The first was inside the Jacksonville red zone on a spot the CBS booth spent two replays and most of a commercial break on. The second was a much bolder thing, in Jacksonville territory in the third quarter, in a game Cleveland was already leading comfortably.

Mansour took both of them before anybody asked and took the second one twice. “They’re both mine,” he said. “The second one especially. I had a number in my head from Thursday about what we needed on fourth down against this front, and I did not go check it against what was in front of me on the field, which is a two-second job and I had the two seconds. It cost us a possession in a game where we were not giving possessions away.” I raised the spot on the first one, because the broadcast had. “I’m not doing the spot,” he said. “The call was bad before the spot was anything.”

Monday, in Berea

He is twenty-eight years old and he won an NFL football game on Sunday and he is not good at hiding either of those facts, which several people in that facility mentioned to me with some affection on Monday morning. He gave up names for four minutes without being prompted: Switzer for the third-down sheet, Mike Rutenberg for the red zone, Warhop and Duce Staley for the run game, Brandon Lynch for having Savage outside in July. He did not once describe a decision of his own that had gone well.

Asked what the fourth quarter was like from where he was standing, he answered a different question first and then noticed. “It was hot. I’m from Michigan, so, I had — somebody kept handing me those little paper cones and I think I got to eleven of them. There’s a page in my call sheet for what we do when we’re up four scores in the fourth quarter. I wrote it in July so the binder would be finished, because I like a finished binder. It has two plays on it. I got down there yesterday and read it and it is the worst page in the book, so we ran what we’d been running all day. Sorry, you asked me about the fourth quarter and I told you about a binder.”

Somebody handed him a football in the tunnel afterward and he did not carry it as far as the podium. Two people who were in the tunnel say he gave it to Priya Raval, a football analyst Cleveland hired in the spring who had flagged the Jacksonville third-and-short tendency in the Wednesday meeting, said something to her that neither of them could hear, and kept walking. Raval declined an interview through a team spokesman. Mansour did not mention it to me and did not mention it at the podium, and I would not know about it had I not asked two people about something else.

What one Sunday is worth

The league’s answer to that arrived quickly and has not moved much since. The AFC personnel director put it the way most of them put it, which is that the two questions have never been the same question. “He can pick players. I thought that in April and I think it harder after Denzel Ward went for two ones. Whether he can coach a football team through a season is a different question and I do not know the answer and I did not learn it on Sunday. Ask me December 1. That’s not me being cute, that’s when you find out.”

A second man asked me not to use anything that would identify him, which in his case is most of his biography. He played nine seasons in this league and has spent longer than that since in personnel departments, trying to get into a chair Mansour walked into. “He won a game in Jacksonville in September,” he said. “I know what that is worth, because I have been in eleven of those places on the Monday after one. What I’m being asked to do is set it next to twenty-three years, by people who have not done a day of either. So I’m not doing a lap for him and I’m not burying him. I watched it. He was fine.” He was angry for all four minutes of that.

The Jacksonville reading is its own thing and is not the one being reported nationally. Two people there said the plan was sound and the third-down execution was not, that a defense which finished first against the run last season gave up 6.2 a carry to a line with a rookie center and a rookie right tackle, and that the pass rush produced one sack against a second-year quarterback making his first Week 1 start. That last number has been the subject of local argument since November. The stadium emptied early, and there was less of it to empty than there used to be.

Cleveland’s own people have been more careful than anyone. Two of them said, separately and in nearly the same words, that Tampa Bay is a better football team than the one they just beat. Delpit, asked whether Sunday changes anything, gave the flattest answer available. “We won one,” he said. “I’ve been 1-0 before.”

After his third touchdown, Harold Fannin Jr. handed the football to the back judge and jogged to the sideline without looking up, and the broadcast came back to it in the fourth quarter because there had been nothing to see the first time. He has four catches this season and three touchdowns. Cleveland plays at Tampa Bay on Sunday.

Jonah Rieger is a senior writer covering the NFL. He reported this story in Jacksonville, in Berea and by telephone over three days. The Athletic does not staff a Jacksonville Jaguars beat; the Jaguars reporting here is the author’s own. Anthony Campanile was not made available. Darnell Savage declined to comment. Priya Raval declined an interview request through the Browns.