First Take

Good morning. Two hours. Our board has been rewritten three times since seven o’clock and I do not think it is finished. Cleveland won fifty-four to fourteen in Tampa yesterday as an underdog and they are 2–0. There are four Cleveland blocks on this board and one of them was a basketball block on Friday. Stephen A.

Holla at your boys! Shae, good morning. Now. Before I do what I’m about to do, let me be fair, because I am always fair. A football team went into somebody else’s stadium and scored fifty-four points. In September. That is on the scoreboard and I would never stand here and tell you a thing that happened did not happen. However.

There it is.

However, I am not going to Cleveland, Ohio this morning. I am going to Tampa, and I am going to talk directly to a quarterback, because he can take it. Baker. Baker Mayfield. That organization put a piece of paper in front of you in July and you looked at it and said no, and that was your right, and I have never once criticized a player for going and getting his. And then you walk out onto your own grass, in front of people who bought a ticket, and hand that football to the Cleveland Browns four times. Four! You are tied for the lead of this league in interceptions thrown and it is September the twenty-first. Eighty-six points surrendered in fourteen days, more than anybody, and you have not won a game. That is a football operation coming apart on television two Sundays in a row, and Cleveland happened to be standing there.

Stephen A., can I get one thing in about the winning team before we go down there? There’s a number on that game nobody has put on television yet and it has been eighteen hours.

Go ahead, Chris.

Cleveland ran it twenty-nine times for eighty-four yards. Two point nine a carry, against a defense nobody in this sport has scored fewer points on, and they won by forty. I played nine years and I don’t have another one of those. Vita Vea was in their backfield six times on his own, six, so Tampa never had a reason to put anybody extra down in that box, and Cleveland put fifty-four on them anyway. Somebody over there decided in the second quarter they were never handing it off again.

Chris, that’s the — can I get four plays up? Four. They’re cut, they’re in order, and if you give me four plays I can show everybody exactly what —

Danny, I love you, hold that, because I am not done being disgusted and I want to be disgusted in the correct direction. Todd Bowles has been running that football team since 2022. And by his own choice, nobody made him do it, that man is the head coach and he is also the man calling that defense. I have sat in a building where one man was doing two jobs and I know what that looks like on a Wednesday. Eleven third downs yesterday and they did not convert one of them. They did not cross the twenty after the first quarter. Not one time. That is an organization telling its own locker room that nobody is coming.

You know who Cleveland is right now? Nobody’s going to like this and I’m saying it anyway. That’s Golden State in 2015. That is exactly what that was.

It’s week two, Perk.

Nobody believed that either.

They won sixty-seven games.

I said what I said.

I’m going to read this one out because nobody has touched it. Zero for eleven on third down. No trips inside the twenty. And they were ahead eight minutes in.

Fourteen to seven! That is a FRAUD. That is a fraudulent football team and it has announced itself to the entire country on two consecutive Sundays. And there is a group of men in that locker room who will not be on that roster in February, who did not ask me to say a word on their behalf, and I am going to say it anyway. Those are professionals. They have families. They moved to that city. And they are being asked to go out on a Sunday and be the reason America is having a wonderful time about the Cleveland Browns. That is blasphemous, and I do not use that word every day.

Is any of this Cleveland, though? At any point today? Because that’s two segments now and I’ve been looking at the same page of my notes.

Chris, everything I have said this morning is about Cleveland.

None of it has been about Cleveland.

It is ten-nineteen in the morning and we are all in Florida. After the break, the head coach, and Skip has been in that chair since a quarter past nine with a sheet of paper he will not let me look at.

You may look at it after.

I will not be looking at it after.

Before anybody starts. Tampa, last night, asked about the coaches and the ex-players who have been saying out loud that a job like his is an insult to the people who did the thirty years. A piece of the answer. Roll it.

YES, SIR. Thank you. Play that in every building in this league tomorrow morning, because it is the only honest sentence said about this football team since January and it came out of the mouth my business has spent two days handing trophies to. He told you. He stood up there in a wet shirt after winning by forty and told you. He skipped it.

He’s 2–0.

Shae, here is what happened in Florida yesterday and it takes eleven seconds. Twenty-six of thirty-five, three hundred and twenty-eight yards, two touchdowns, nothing handed to anybody, and he ran one in from fifteen himself. And a defensive coach changed a coverage. That is the game. Everything since four o’clock yesterday is my business making a forty-point win about a man in a headset, because a man in a headset is a better story than a second-year quarterback, and I have watched this business do that to me for thirty-five years. Nick Uploads did not throw a football yesterday.

We’re not doing that.

Nick Uploads did not catch one either.

Skip. Skip, hold on, because — seven touchdowns on eight red-zone trips. Four for four on fourth down. That is a call sheet. That is a man deciding things on a Wednesday and having the stomach to do them on a Sunday, and you can hate the hire and still —

I’ll take your fourth downs. Here are mine. Twenty-nine carries, eighty-four yards, against the worst defense in the National Football League. Chris, you said it out loud yourself in the last segment and nobody wrote it down. He has coached two football games in his life and he has been out-coached in both of them.

He won them by twenty-eight and forty.

Correct.

So what are you —

Chris, since you have pushed me, I’ll go where I was going anyway. He is the worst head coach in the National Football League. Today. Sitting at 2–0 with more points than any team in football, he is the worst head coach in this league, and I see no reason those two cannot sit next to each other. They are sitting next to each other on this paper.

And the second quarter. Darnell Savage gave up over a hundred and fifty yards in one quarter of football. A thirty-six-yard touchdown, and an eighty-seven-yard touchdown on the first snap after a punt pinned them inside their own fifteen. And the head coach left him out there. I take that man off the field at the first television timeout and I say so at the podium afterward, by name.

He finished with a pick and two balls knocked down.

Because they quit throwing it at him.

That’s not why. Shae, can I — four plays. Second and eight, first drive of the second quarter, they show him one thing before the snap and they are in something completely different by the time he gets to the top of his drop, and it happens on the next one, and the one after —

Who called it, Dan?

I don’t know.

Thank you.

That’s not a — okay. Okay.

Dan.

No, I’m good.

You’ve got the tape.

It’s cued. Four plays, a minute ten, the best minute ten anybody played this weekend. I’m going to sit here.

You’re going to sit there.

I’m going to sit here.

Let me give you a comparison and then I’ll take a breath. I could have coached that football game yesterday. I am seventy-four years old. Not one team, not one practice, not one afternoon of it anywhere. I could have coached that football game and Cleveland wins by thirty.

Skip — Skip, that’s his argument. That is his entire argument. That’s what those people in Cleveland have been saying since January.

It is not.

That is word for word what it is.

It is not, and the difference is I would not have taken the job. Here is the other one, free. The best thing that could happen to that young quarterback is that football team hires a real head coach before Thanksgiving.

NOW. Hold on. Hold on, hold on. Skip. Skip! You have done something I did not believe was available to a man on a Monday. You have put me in a position where the only way out of this conversation is to say something kind about the Cleveland Browns, and I will not do it. I am not being maneuvered into defending an organization that took a hundred and seventeen point six million dollars off its own books in January and got nothing back that plays football, and that number is sitting there this morning while everybody dances. Do not put me in Cleveland, Ohio, Skip.

Then agree with me.

I am not agreeing with you either!

Sixty-seven and fifteen, by the way.

What?

Golden State. In 2015. You said sixty-seven, it was sixty-seven and fifteen. I looked it up.

That was fifteen minutes ago, Perk.

And I was right fifteen minutes ago.

Can I do the thing I was going to do before the — hold on. Shae, what was I on?

Fourth downs.

Fourth downs. Thank you. Four for four. And here’s where I am on it, and I’m going to say it badly, because I’ve been trying to say it since six o’clock this morning and my wife did not want to hear it either. I have watched this team twice now. Twice. Both Sundays I sit down and wait for the thing this franchise does, the thing everybody in America is waiting for, and it has not come, and I don’t know where to put that. Two weeks against two teams that have not won a game is two weeks against two teams that have not won a game. But I have not had this much fun watching a bad idea in years.

Jacksonville and Tampa Bay are 0–4. Say that part on television.

I said it. I said it in the sentence.

Say it slower.

Ninety seconds. Skip, you get the last of it and then we are going to a linebacker, and Dan is going to be allowed to speak in the second hour because I have promised him.

Yep.

The last of it is this. In eleven days that team plays Pittsburgh on a Thursday night with the cornerback they sold to Pittsburgh on the other sideline, and everybody at this desk is going to find out what I have known since January. I will be sitting right here. Nick Upl—

Break.

Second-year linebacker, wears the green dot, that is the stat line. Chris, you first, you have been pointing at the monitor since it went up.

Two picks and four passes knocked down by an off-ball linebacker in one afternoon. And people should know what that does for a defensive lineman, because I was one. When your linebacker plays the pass like that, the man in front of him gets to be selfish. He rushes. He is not worrying about who’s over the back side. Cleveland had four sacks and I’d give two of them to the twenty-three-year-old, and he is not on the sheet for either.

What’s a green dot?

Sticker on his helmet. The coach can talk to him.

That’s it?

That’s it.

I have been hearing green dot for eleven years.

I’m going to say something good and then take the rest of it back, so enjoy the first half. That is the best young linebacker in the National Football League and I’d have him on my football team tomorrow. Second-round pick, twenty-three years old, and he plays every snap like somebody in this sport told him no once and he has not forgotten it. I would watch him again tonight.

That’s the nicest thing you have said in two years.

Now. Somebody put a sticker on his helmet. Nobody taught him to do that.

And WHO. Was he doing it. To. Two interceptions off a man who went number one in this league’s draft and has been in the business nine years. Nine! One more thing about that organization and I’ll let it go for the day.

You will not let it go for the day.

I will not, and you knew that when you booked me. The Glazer family. Successful people, they have a trophy nobody can take off them. And you have watched two football games this season and not asked one question out loud, and you have a man down there doing the work of two men and you have let him, because the alternative is admitting something in September. I have seen what that costs a locker room.

Cleveland’s head coach has both jobs too, Stephen A.

That is a completely different situation.

How?

Because I said it is, Chris!

(laughing) That’s the answer? That’s the answer he’s giving me on a Monday?

It is the answer, Perk, and you have not said one thing this morning that was about a football.

Sixty-seven and fifteen.

Ninety seconds and then final takes. Anybody hear one thing this morning they did not have on Saturday?

The linebacker, yeah.

Nothing.

I have four plays.