The Browns scored 54 in Tampa and ran for 84 yards, and nine things from Sunday: Mary Kay Cabot

CLEVELAND, Ohio — How do the Browns win a game 54-14 and get on the plane with the same complaint they got off it with?

They gained 477 yards on Sunday at 6.8 a play, made 26 first downs, took three penalties, turned the ball over once and punted twice. Tampa Bay finished with 292 yards, 12 first downs, no trip inside the Cleveland 20 and four interceptions thrown.

The Browns also handed the ball off 29 times for 84 yards, which is 2.9 a carry. Quinshon Judkins had 14 of those carries for 27 yards and put one on the ground.

Cleveland is 2-0 by a combined 68 points, and no team in football is scoring more: 44.5 a game. Nobody came out of the game, and the week’s first practice report is filed Wednesday in Berea.

Here are nine things from Sunday, in the order they are going to matter this week:

1Vita Vea beat the middle of this offensive line by himself, and he is the second man to do it in seven days

Vea finished with 10 tackles, six of them behind the line of scrimmage, a sack and four hits on the quarterback. Two Browns blocked him on most snaps and three of them blocked him on some, and he won anyway.

Because he did that, Tampa Bay never had to put extra men near the football. Cleveland spent the afternoon running into light boxes and getting nothing out of them.

Zion Johnson, Parker Brailsford and Elgton Jenkins were all beaten inside in Jacksonville, and all three of them were beaten inside again on Sunday. Six Browns were asked about it in that locker room afterward and none of them used a name.

Brailsford was the 146th pick in April and he is not going to move a man Vea’s size this season. Every team in the league knew that in April, including this one.

Jenkins is the one I keep coming back to. He was a two-time Pro Bowl center for the Packers, he signed here in March to steady the inside of this line, and through two Sundays he is the furthest of the three from what the Browns paid for.

I wrote a week ago that moving Jenkins to center was the fix already sitting in this building. I am not writing that this week.

There is no help coming from outside, either. Cleveland has not added an offensive lineman since cutdowns, and the interior depth in that building is Luke Wypler, Zak Zinter, Kendrick Green and Tevin Jenkins, all of whom George Warhop has had since the spring.

The other help available inside is a tight end or a running back, and each of them has a job on the play already. Cleveland is not going to spend Harold Fannin Jr. on Vita Vea for four quarters. Two weeks of tape are going to make somebody ask.

What Cleveland did instead was double Vea and get the ball out. Travis Switzer’s quick game and the run-pass options were the offense for long stretches, and the Browns gave up one sack in 36 dropbacks. The sack was Vea’s.

2Doubling Vea left both tackles out there alone, and neither tackle was beaten

Tytus Howard played left tackle without help for most of the game and Max Iheanachor played right tackle without help for nearly all of it. Cleveland did not surrender a pressure off either edge.

Rueben Bain Jr. is the pass rusher Tampa Bay spent a first-round pick on in April, and he finished Sunday with nothing against a rookie. In Jacksonville it was Josh Hines-Allen. That is two starts against two first-round pass rushers, and neither of them has gotten home.

Iheanachor went ninth overall, and the argument about that pick has always been about where he was taken rather than about what he is. Two September afternoons do not settle a draft argument.

What is useful this week is that the Browns can leave him out there and spend their help somewhere else. A team drafting a tackle in the top 10 is buying exactly that.

Dawand Jones is the backup at left tackle and Austin Barber, the 86th pick in April, is behind Iheanachor. Neither has played an offensive snap this season.

His run blocking is a separate conversation and it is not there yet. He is not moving people off the ball, and Sunday was an afternoon when Cleveland needed somebody up front to move somebody.

3The Browns did not take Darnell Savage off the field

Savage was beaten for better than 150 yards inside the first quarter. Jalen McMillan scored on him from 36 yards out. Chris Godwin scored on him from 87 one play after Corey Bojorquez had dropped a punt inside the Tampa Bay 15.

The Buccaneers had 14 points eight minutes into the game and did not score again.

Most staffs sit that player. The Browns changed what they were asking him to do instead — out of man coverage, into off-zone with disguise in front of it and pressure coming out of the zone — and left him on the boundary.

Tampa Bay did not convert another third down, 0-for-11 for the game. Baker Mayfield finished 16-of-32 for 267 yards with two touchdowns and four interceptions. Savage had four tackles, an interception and a pass broken up. Mayfield’s four interceptions are tied for the most any quarterback in the league has thrown this season, and it is Week 2.

Mike Rutenberg is the coordinator here and Brandon Lynch coaches the defensive backs. Asked about the decision three separate ways on Sunday, Nick Mansour put the first quarter on the plan and gave the afternoon to those two and to Savage.

Cleveland trusts three corners. Tyson Campbell is one, Grant Delpit is playing the big slot after six seasons at safety, and Savage signed in late August and has been outside for about a month. Tyler Hall and Myles Harden are what is behind them.

More Browns Mansour on the coverage change, asked three times, and the game ball he did not carry into the room · Sixteen Browns spoke in Tampa. Six were asked about the offensive line and none of them answered it · The Athletic, at length, on how the coverage change came together

4Carson Schwesinger had the best game of any defensive player in the league on Sunday

Eleven tackles. Four stops behind the line of scrimmage, a sack, a hit on the quarterback, four passes defensed and two of the four interceptions Mayfield threw.

He has six passes defensed through two games, which is the most in the NFL, and he is a 23-year-old in his second season who was a preferred walk-on at UCLA five years ago.

He also wears the green dot. The coverage change in the first quarter arrived in his helmet, and he was the man responsible for getting 10 other people lined up inside a defense that had just changed shape mid-game.

The AFC defensive player of the week gets announced Wednesday. I do not know what else that ballot would be looking at.

Jared Verse finished with four stops behind the line himself and Mike Hall Jr. with three. The Browns moved Myles Garrett to the Rams in June and spent Sunday living in Mayfield’s backfield with the thinnest position group on this roster.

544.5 points a game, against everything this franchise has been

Eighty-nine points in two games. Put that next to a football team that scored 16.4 a game in 2025, second-to-last in the league, and an astounding 15.2 a game the year before that.

Eight trips inside the Tampa Bay 20 produced seven touchdowns. Cleveland went 4-for-4 on fourth down and 5-of-13 on third.

That third-down number is the one I would keep an eye on. It was 8-for-11 in Jacksonville, and on Sunday the fourth downs covered for it in a game that was decided by halftime.

Andre Szmyt had an extra point blocked and is 8-of-9 on the season on extra points. He made both of his field goals, from 30 and from 45.

6Shedeur Sanders was asked to be the entire offense and was

He completed 26 of 35 throws for 328 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions, and added 29 rushing yards and a 15-yard touchdown run. Three touchdowns, on an afternoon with no run game underneath him.

Nobody in the league has completed a higher share of his throws through two weeks, at 77 percent. Nobody has a better rating, at 131.8, and nobody is averaging more per attempt, at 10.2. He has four passing touchdowns and no interceptions.

The 393 net passing yards came with Vea in the middle of that protection all afternoon. Sanders was sacked once in 36 dropbacks and the football was out on time on nearly every snap.

He is 24 and in his second season. He threw 35 times on Sunday against a front that was in his lap for four quarters and did not put one in a Buccaneer’s hands.

7Where the ball went: two rookie receivers, a tight end leading the league, and a first touchdown

Denzel Boston caught eight passes for 105 yards and a touchdown, and the touchdown was a contested ball over Zyon McCollum that he went up and got with both feet down. He was the 39th pick in April.

KC Concepcion caught seven balls for 96 yards, 46 of them after the catch, carried it three times and returned three punts. His punt return average of 11.8 is the best in the league.

Harold Fannin Jr. leads the NFL in total touchdowns with five — three receiving and two rushing — and he is 22 years old and in his second year out of Bowling Green. He caught four for 68 and a score on Sunday and ran one in from the 2.

He also dropped two footballs on Sunday, which is two more than he dropped in Jacksonville.

Israel Abanikanda scored the first touchdown of his Browns career. He signed in late August and he is the third back on this roster behind Judkins and Dylan Sampson.

8The money and the roster, on the Monday after a 40-point win

There is still $117.6 million of dead money sitting on this year’s cap, all of it charged to a quarterback the Browns released in January. Forty points in Tampa did not move that figure by a dollar.

Cleveland owns Pittsburgh’s first-round pick in 2027 and Pittsburgh’s first-round pick in 2028, from the Ward trade in August. The Steelers beat New England 30-3 on Sunday, which is the exact scoreline they lost by at home in Week 1, and those two picks get worse every time Pittsburgh looks like that.

The Giants’ third-round pick in 2027, which came back for Jerry Jeudy, belongs to a team that is 0-2.

Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah will not play this year and remains on reserve/PUP. Maliek Collins is still one of the 53 and has not taken a snap in either game -- two weeks into a season, on a front that cannot spare one.

Nobody was hurt on Sunday. That is two straight games on a roster that has no veteran sitting behind its defensive line and nobody proven sitting behind its guards.

9Carolina on Sunday, and then a Thursday night that changes the whole week

The AFC North after two weeks: Cincinnati 2-0, Cleveland 2-0, Baltimore 1-1, Pittsburgh 1-1. The Browns do not play a division game until the Steelers come here on Oct. 1, and they will have played four games by then without leaving the Eastern time zone.

Sunday is the first home game of the season. The Browns have played two road games in Florida and Northeast Ohio has not seen this team play a snap that counts.

The Panthers come to Cleveland on Sunday, Sept. 27 at 1 p.m. They are 1-1 and they beat Atlanta convincingly on Sunday, and Bryce Young leads the NFL in yards per carry at 8.8, ahead of every running back in football.

Then Pittsburgh comes here on Thursday, Oct. 1, in prime time. Ward comes back to this stadium in a Steelers uniform 11 days from now, in the national window, against the team that traded him.

One thing to understand about that before the schedule does it to you. A Thursday game four days after a Sunday game means no practice week. Cleveland plays Carolina, comes off the field Sunday evening, and the next real football takes place three days later.

The men who are sore on Monday morning do not get healthy by Thursday. The injury report gets filed on a compressed schedule, the pads mostly stay in the equipment room, and the game plan is walked through rather than practiced.

It also puts a squeeze on a thin roster. A team that needs bodies on a short week is reaching for the practice squad, and each of those players can be elevated to a gameday roster twice in a season before the Browns have to sign him outright. On a defensive line already down Maliek Collins, that arithmetic starts to matter in October rather than in December.

Which means the Browns are game-planning Pittsburgh this week, in the middle of a Carolina week, whether anybody in Berea says so on Wednesday.

Cleveland is 2-0 and has not yet played a home game, or a team with a win on its record. Carolina is here Sunday at one o’clock and the Browns practice Wednesday in Berea.