They changed the coverage instead of the corner: reconstructing eleven minutes of a 54-14 in Tampa

Baker Mayfield threw an 87-yard touchdown to Chris Godwin on the first snap after a Cleveland punt had died inside the Tampa Bay 15, and with 2:25 left in the first quarter the Browns were losing on the road to a team that had scored twice in under eight minutes. Darnell Savage, in his second game at a position he moved to over the summer, had given up more than 150 yards in a quarter, including a 36-yard touchdown to Jalen McMillan on the possession before it. He was out there for the next snap the Buccaneers played and for every one after that, and they scored nothing for the remaining three quarters.

The rest of the afternoon reads like a typo. Eleven third downs, none converted. No red-zone trip at any point in the game, in any quarter, at any score. Four interceptions off Mayfield, two of them to a 23-year-old linebacker. Tampa finished with 292 total yards at 5.8 a play, 234 net passing, 58 rushing and twelve first downs. Cleveland scored 54, was perfect on fourth down at four attempts, scored touchdowns on seven of its eight possessions inside the 20 and won by 40 on a field that read past a hundred degrees at kickoff with no cloud and no wind in it.

Here is the case against every word of that, and it is a good case. Jacksonville is 0-2. Tampa Bay is 0-2 and has surrendered 86 points in two weeks, the worst figure in the league, with a defense Todd Bowles calls himself because he declined to hire a coordinator for it. Cleveland leads the league in scoring at 44.5 a game against two clubs with no wins between them. Six of the eleven people I talked to for this story made that argument to me and two of the six work for the Browns.

Those eleven, over four days: six who work for Cleveland, four of whom had a headset on in the first quarter, two who work for Tampa Bay, a personnel executive at an NFC club with nothing at stake either way, and two men who have called an NFL defense and work for neither team. Almost none of them would be named. Cleveland does not make assistants available in season. Mike Rutenberg declined an interview request through the club. So did Brandon Lynch. Dom Capers declined one for the eighth time since February.

Eight minutes

Cleveland opened this game almost entirely in man coverage and stayed there, and the reason is not a secret. Emeka Egbuka and Cade Otton work the middle of a field, and Tampa builds much of its early-down passing around getting one of them clean inside. The Browns wanted to send a fifth rusher without presenting a fifth rusher, which costs you a safety, and a safety is the only thing between a boundary corner and a receiver who has been running past people for a decade. That trade came due twice in seven minutes and fifty seconds.

The McMillan touchdown came first, at 10:15, on a concept Cleveland had rehearsed against and did not stop. Quinshon Judkins tied it from eight yards out. Then Corey Bojorquez, who punted twice all day and averaged 52.5 yards with both of them dying inside the 20, hit one of them 53 yards and it stopped dead, and eleven seconds later it was 14-7 the other way. Godwin finished the game with two catches for 108 yards. He did not catch a third one.

Three of the four defensive people I asked said they would have taken Savage off the field, and one of them has done it, in September, to a corner he liked. “You tell yourself you’re doing it for him,” he said. “Get him to the bench, get him some air, get him back out there in the third. And then he doesn’t play again until November, because you just told forty-five men what you think of him and you can’t take it back on a Tuesday. I’ve done that to a player. I wouldn’t say I’d do it again. I’d say I did it.”

Nobody in Cleveland brought it up. Four people say the words “take him out” were not spoken by anybody, in any form, during that first quarter, and two of them volunteered it before I asked. What happened instead is that a 75-year-old man said one sentence on the coaches’ channel after the McMillan touchdown, six minutes or so before the throw the sport has been talking about ever since.

Who said it first

Dom Capers is Cleveland’s senior defensive assistant. Two franchises hired him to be their first head coach and he built both rosters out of an expansion draft. He ran the defense on a Super Bowl winner. He has been drawing a paycheck in this league for four decades. He is the only man in that facility who has held the job his head coach holds, and he has not given an interview since the day he was hired.

Two of the four people with that channel in their ear named him without being prompted. A third remembered the sentence and not the voice. What Capers said, as three of them reconstruct it, did not mention Savage. It was about route distribution: that Tampa had shown him the same two-man release from the same grouping three times inside eleven minutes, that the top of the field was being set up, and that it was coming. He said it once. Two people have him working on the front’s alignment against Tampa’s two-tight-end sets for the rest of the afternoon and saying almost nothing about the secondary.

Nothing changed on the next series, and that has been flattened out of every version of this told this week. Cleveland was still in man when Godwin caught the football. One of the people who heard Capers described the four minutes in between as ordinary, because coaches say things like that on every drive of every game and most of them are wrong.

Mike Rutenberg calls this defense and he calls it from the coaches’ booth. He came down to the field during Cleveland’s touchdown drive at the end of the first quarter, which is not unusual for him, and the change went in there, on the sideline, standing up, with about two minutes left in the quarter.

What went in was not improvised. The install belongs to Brandon Lynch, the secondary coach, and it dates to July: off-zone with the safeties rotating after the snap instead of before it, the presentation before the ball moves built to be unlike the coverage after it, and Ephraim Banda’s pressure package on top of that, four rushers who are not the four men the protection is looking at. Cleveland had run pieces of it in Jacksonville. It had never been the base call for three quarters of a football game.

Rutenberg asked Lynch one question before he committed, and three people gave me the same version of it: whether Savage could play the technique cold, having repped it in the summer and not in a Tampa week. Lynch said yes and attached nothing to the yes. Then Rutenberg told the booth the defense was in it for the remainder, and he said that sentence twice, in the same words, because the first time nobody answered him.

Three people say Savage’s name was not said on that channel again before halftime.

Nick Mansour was not part of any of it and has said so, at a podium, in a hallway afterward and again on Monday. Everyone I asked describes it the same way, including the two people who do not work for Cleveland and had no reason to protect anybody’s version. He calls the offense. By the end of the first quarter he was on the other channel, being handed three ways to replace a running game that had stopped existing.

That is now a pattern and it will be argued about all season by people who cannot both be right. He has given credit away by name in every availability he has held, including for decisions that were his, and for a second week he handed off the game ball without saying so until Mary Kay Cabot raised it. Louis Riddick said on ESPN this week that nobody outside that building knows what the head coach did on Sunday. He is right. I have spent four days on it and I can tell you what six people say and not what it is worth.

Two minutes on the bench

Savage came off after the 87 and sat at the end of the bench with his helmet on. For the length of Cleveland’s touchdown drive, two minutes and twenty-three seconds ending with Harold Fannin Jr. catching a 17-yard throw with two seconds left, nobody spoke to him. Lynch stood a few feet away and did not go over. One of the two people who put it at most of that drive said Lynch was waiting to have something to hand him rather than something to say to him.

Mansour came down the bench once during the drive. He asked Lynch a question, listened, and went back to the offense. Two people standing inside of ten feet say the question was whether somebody ought to tell Savage the change was not a punishment, and that Lynch said he had it. That is the whole of the head coach’s involvement in the most-discussed coaching decision of the weekend, and he did not raise it in Tampa, where three different people asked him about Savage.

What Lynch eventually said is on the record, because Savage repeated it in the visiting locker room when somebody asked. It is a technique instruction and it is four seconds long. It contains no reassurance of any kind, and when Savage was asked whether he felt he had gotten the afternoon back he said he did not know what the question meant.

His first snap in the new coverage was the second play of the second quarter. Godwin was the receiver. He finished with four tackles, a pass defensed and an interception in the fourth quarter, and afterward he stood in front of nine reporters, packed and ready to go, and would not leave until they had run out of questions.

“A corner is the only guy out there whose bad day is a highlight,” the personnel executive said. “Everybody else, you have to know what you’re looking at. So what you’re deciding at 14-7 is whether you want to be seen doing something, and most of us do. They had a call they liked and a coach who told them the man could run it.”

Eleven third downs

Mayfield finished 16 of 32 for 267 yards with two touchdowns, four interceptions and a rating of 59.8, and both touchdowns were thrown before 2:25 of the first quarter. He was sacked twice for 33 yards. Two people in Tampa said the same thing in different words, which is that the problem was not pressure and was not a receiver being covered. What he read before the snap kept turning into something else half a second after it, over and over, in that heat, behind a running game that produced 58 yards.

Carson Schwesinger had eleven tackles, four for loss, a sack, a quarterback hit, two interceptions and four passes defensed, was named AFC Defensive Player of the Week on Wednesday. Nobody in the league has broken up more passes. He is 23, he wears the green dot, and every defensive person I asked went to him before they went to the coverage. A staff can install something on a sideline in a hundred degrees and play it for three quarters without a bust only if the middle of the field can carry it.

Jared Verse had seven tackles, four for loss, three hits on the quarterback and his first sack as a Brown, and Tampa slid protection to him most of the first half. Mike Hall Jr. had four tackles and three for loss. Mason Graham had three quarterback hits and no sack for a second week running. Cleveland finished with 60 tackles, fifteen for loss, two sacks, eight quarterback hits, four interceptions and eight passes defensed, and Bucky Irving carried it eighteen times for 42 yards.

“The disguise isn’t the hard part, everybody disguises,” one of the former coordinators said. “The hard part is doing it with the same eleven for fifty snaps without one of them being a half-count late, because the first time somebody’s late it’s an explosive and you’re back to what you were doing. They weren’t late. On a first install, in September, in that. And I’m saying it as a man who thinks two games against those two teams is nothing.”

Sunday, by side

	CLE	TB
Total yards	477	292
Yards per play	6.8	5.8
Net passing	393	234
Rushing (att)	84 (29)	58
First downs	26	12
Third down	5-13	0-11
Fourth down	4-4	2-2
Red-zone TDs	7-8	no trips
Sacks allowed (yds)	1 (15)	2 (33)
Turnovers	1	4
Penalties	3	5
Punts	2	—

Fifty

The other reconstruction available from Sunday is the one Cleveland lost, and it will matter more in October than the coverage will. Vita Vea played nose tackle at 31 years old in that heat and finished with ten tackles, six for loss, four hits on the quarterback and a sack.

Two people in Tampa and one Cleveland assistant walked me through the same second-quarter snap without knowing the others had. Cleveland put two men on Vea and sent a back across to chip him, so three bodies, and he took the whole arrangement backward into the pocket, threw the outside blocker off and made the tackle himself. Not split a double. Won it, with a third man attached.

The second effect decided the football game. Because Vea holds up against two, Bowles never had to put an extra defender in the box, which meant the edges stayed covered, which meant there was nowhere to go outside either. The Browns ran it 29 times for 84 yards, 2.9 a carry. Take out Shedeur Sanders’ two scrambles and the backs and the fullback carried it 21 times for 46. Judkins had fourteen for 27 and a touchdown and put the ball on the ground on the second drive for Cleveland’s only turnover.

The interior of the Cleveland line was beaten for a second straight week, and Zion Johnson, Parker Brailsford and Elgton Jenkins are three different problems inside one. Brailsford was a fifth-round pick in April and is a rookie center giving ground to a 350-pound man, which is roughly what a fifth-round rookie center does in September. Jenkins is 30, signed a two-year contract in March, is a captain and has now had two of these in eight days. Johnson told reporters he had been beaten off the ball twice early and did not need Tuesday’s tape to tell him so, and then said he was not putting anybody else’s name in their notebooks.

The tackles were the opposite. Cleveland allowed one sack all afternoon, for fifteen yards, and it did not come off the edge. Max Iheanachor went ninth in April, well above where the industry had him ranked, which was the twenties, and has now played two games on first-round edge rushers, Josh Hines-Allen and then Rueben Bain Jr., without giving up a pressure. Tytus Howard was left alone on Yaya Diaby most of the day. Three penalties, on the road, with five rookies starting.

Twenty-six of thirty-five

What has been missing from four days of argument about Shedeur Sanders is this, and I got it from two Cleveland assistants separately: the quick-game and RPO package that carried the second and third quarters was not a sideline improvisation. It went into the plan on Wednesday, in Berea, and the reason was Vita Vea. That staff got on the plane believing there was a real chance they would not be able to run the football at all, and built an offense that used run action without needing the run to work. Twelve personnel, the same backfield movement, the ball out of the quarterback’s hand instead of into the back’s stomach, and a linebacker who still has to honor Judkins.

He went 26 of 35 for 328 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions, at 74 percent and 9.3 yards a throw, for a rating of 122.1. He took one sack. He carried it twice for 29 yards and ran one in from fifteen on a snap where the call was a give and he kept it. Cleveland threw for 408 gross and 393 net. Dillon Gabriel finished it 5 of 6 for 80.

Denzel Boston had eight catches for 105 and a touchdown, a long of 23, 21 yards after the catch, and beat Zyon McCollum to a 17-yard ball in the third quarter, boxing him off and landing in bounds. KC Concepcion had seven for 96 with 46 of them after the catch and a drop on third down on the opening series. Fannin had four for 68 and a touchdown and dropped two. DeAndre Hopkins had three for 30, Judkins three for 38 out of the backfield.

Through two games Sanders is 46 of 59 for 603 yards with four touchdown passes, none intercepted, plus the run, and he leads the NFL in completion percentage, in passer rating at 131.8 and in yards per attempt at 10.2. He has also played two defenses that are 0-2, one of them the most generous unit in football through two weeks. Both of those are true. Most of this week’s argument has required picking one. Cleveland went 5 for 13 on third down, and Sanders raised that himself before anybody asked him to.

The other sideline

Tampa Bay is 0-2, has allowed 86 points and entered September as the betting favorite in its division at +164 with a win total of 8.5. Bowles is in his fifth season, is openly on the hot seat, and employs no defensive coordinator. He did not hire one. He calls it himself, which he has done before and which has worked before, and two people there told me it is the only subject in that facility nobody raises in a room with more than four people in it.

One of them wanted it clear that Cleveland is not the reason to have that conversation. “We gave up thirty-two in Week 1 and nobody wrote a word,” he said. “Now it’s 54 and everybody’s got a theory about the structure of our staff. Both games are the same problem and it isn’t the play caller. We don’t have anybody in the middle of the field. That’s the whole answer and it doesn’t get solved in a week.”

Mayfield went into camp without the extension he wanted and the two sides have not spoken since. He has four interceptions in two games, tied for the league lead.

What two Sundays are worth

The league’s reading of Cleveland has moved about an inch in nine days, and everybody who moved it wanted me to write down that they had not moved it far. “Two things are being conflated and it’s making everybody dumber,” the personnel executive said. “One, is that a well-coached football team. Sunday, yes, and I know who I’m crediting and it isn’t the head coach. Two, can a twenty-eight-year-old run an operation over nineteen weeks with a losing streak in it and an agent calling a TV guy. Nobody learned anything about the second one on Sunday. And the first one is what’s on television.”

Nobody in this story hedged harder than the six men who work for the Browns, which was true in Jacksonville as well. Two of them brought up Carolina before I did and one brought up Pittsburgh, eleven days out, the way a person changes a subject. Grant Delpit, the longest-tenured player in that locker room, said the defense took four takeaways in one afternoon and had four in the whole of last season, and then put himself in the first quarter for a crack block that put him on the ground.

Cleveland flew home from a second consecutive road game over a hundred degrees without a single man to put on a Wednesday injury report. Nothing about this team is discussed less.

What Cleveland carries into a home opener is a defense that installed its base coverage on a bench in the middle of a road game and has not changed it since, an interior offensive line beaten twice by good interior defensive linemen, a quarterback leading the league in three categories, and a record built against opponents who are 0-4. Savage put the game ball in his bag and did not take it out. Carolina is at the lakefront on Sunday having beaten Atlanta by a distance, and Pittsburgh is there on a Thursday night eleven days later with Denzel Ward on the other sideline. Neither of those teams is 0-2.

Jonah Rieger is a senior writer covering the NFL. He reported this story from Tampa, from Berea and by telephone across four days. Eleven people contributed. Nine of them are unnamed here because they were not authorised to discuss what happened on a coaches’ channel. Mike Rutenberg, Brandon Lynch and Dom Capers each turned down interview requests made through the Cleveland Browns.