For 45 minutes Sunday, the Browns outplayed a Packers team fighting for its playoff life. A newfound offensive effort, led by a reinstated Josh Gordon, had found seams all afternoon, making the most of a budding group of skill players to sustain drives and confuse the Green Bay defense.
And then after the best 45 minutes of Cleveland’s season, the Packers found a way to drop 20 unanswered points on their host and keep the Browns lost in a labyrinth of sadness.
The Packers overcame a 21-7 fourth-quarter deficit behind steady play from quarterback Brett Hundley. The Green Bay backup tossed a pair of late-game touchdowns, which proved to be the difference between a renewed postseason push and calling the 2017 season a loss. A pair of strikes to Davante Adams pushed Green Bay to 7-6 on the year — right in the thick of the playoff race with monster games against the Panthers and Vikings looming.
The Browns, on the other hand...
The Browns dismissed general manager Sashi Brown earlier in the week but still remained the Browns
John Dorsey has been Cleveland’s general manager for not even four days. The only move of consequence he’s made has been to release underperforming — and overpaid — wideout Kenny Britt. But after three quarters of solid play, he was in position to go undefeated as a member of the team’s front office.
The Browns made Brown the scapegoat for their 1-27 record since 2016 but kept Hue Jackson in place at head coach despite his ever-widening reputation as an all-time league leader in futility. That move nearly paid dividends Sunday. Jackson was mostly anonymous on the sideline, which is always good for a head coach. He didn’t make any head-scratching decisions and mostly deferred to his top weapons on the offensive side of the ball.
His faith failed to pay off as the clock wound down. While he supplied DeShone Kizer with the kind of playcalling to set a career high in passing touchdowns with three, he also was forced to stand and watch as his rookie passer’s freestyling went horribly awry. His third-down arm punt in overtime set up the Packers’ game-winning drive.
That finish erased what had been an impressive performance and inserted a familiar narrative to Sunday’s game. The Browns, as is tradition, failed to make things easy on themselves. Before his horror-Mary third down INT, Kizer had failed to sustain a series of fourth-quarter drives that would have bled the clock and erased Hundley’s comeback attempts. Sloppy tackles throughout the final 10 minutes of the game turned potential Green Bay losses into big gains and first downs. Trevor Davis’ 65-yard punt return set up a 25-yard scoring drive that sent this game to overtime and made Week 14 another exercise in misery for Ohio’s staid factory of sadness.
So while the Browns made some big changes this week, the outcome on the field was still extremely Browns-y. Cleveland is now 0-13 with games against the Ravens, Bears, and Steelers remaining. The clock is ticking on a winless season — and this team can’t afford another wasted opportunity if it wants to make its season merely putrid rather than notorious.
Even in a loss, Josh Gordon made a difference for Cleveland
Gordon has only played in two games with the Browns since 2014 — but it’s clear he’s just what the beleaguered franchise needs on the field. The former All-Pro was the catalyst of Cleveland’s offensive revival Sunday afternoon, paving the way for one of the best performances of Kizer’s budding career (as poorly as it may have finished) and what was nearly the franchise’s first win since Christmas Eve 2016.
Gordon was the spark that set off a modest explosion on the shore of Lake Erie. In just his second game back from a series of suspensions that cost him more than two seasons of playing time, the 26-year-old has reestablished himself as one of the league’s top receivers.
Sunday saw him stretch the Packers’ secondary early on with two receptions for 56 yards and a touchdown on the first drive alone. That big performance forced Green Bay to recalculate its secondary strategy, and the team’s newfound focus on Gordon allowed other Browns — namely Corey Coleman and Isaiah Crowell — to shine. The end result was only the team’s third 20-plus point performance of the season — even if that didn’t translate into a win.
Despite a win that shouldn’t inspire confidence, the Packers have something to look forward to
With a win Sunday, Green Bay climbed back over .500 at 7-6 — one game from a potential Wild Card spot. Next week, former NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers will be eligible to return from injured reserve. Whether he’ll be cleared to return from the broken collarbone that’s sidelined him since Week 6 is up in the air, but the impetus to rush him back remains, especially after Sunday’s win prevented the team’s playoff hopes from dropping from “longshot” to “nearly nonexistent.”
The Packers are still alive in the race to the second season, and a postseason invite may be the greatest non-Super Bowl accomplishment of Mike McCarthy’s coaching career. Injuries derailed the franchise’s Super Bowl hopes, taking key players like Rodgers, Bryan Bulaga, Quinten Rollins, and Ty Montgomery out of the lineup for extended stretches. Despite those losses, the team is still fighting to keep a playoff streak that dates back to 2009 alive.
But Green Bay has plenty of questions to answer before it can stake its claim as one of the league’s worthy teams. Those aforementioned injuries have forced some hard evaluations as the team enters its postseason push — is the Packers’ middling performance in the secondary, pass rush, and offensive line the result of those lost players, or were they a harbinger of bad things to come?
Without Nick Perry on the field Sunday, the Packers managed just two sacks of a quarterback who’d been sacked 11 times his last three games. Kizer had only thrown more than one passing touchdown in a game once in his pro career — a two-TD performance in Week 3 against the Colts. On Sunday, he found the end zone three times. After allowing Rodgers to be sacked on just 5.7 percent of his dropbacks last fall, Rodgers and Hundley have been sacked on 9.5 percent of their passing attempts in 2017 — the second-worst mark in the league.
If Rodgers’ collarbone is sufficiently healed, he’ll have to shake off the rust immediately. Green Bay’s next two weeks include showdowns with the Vikings and Panthers — two of the NFC’s best teams. Winning in Charlotte is no easy task, as Minnesota saw Sunday in a streak-killing 31-24 loss. They’ll have the benefit of hosting the Vikes in Rodgers’ revenge game the next week in a contest that could determine whether Green Bay still has a puncher’s chance.
Sunday proved there are no gimmes on the Packers’ winding road to the postseason. Rodgers’ prospective return will help in the future, but Green Bay can’t expect to keep its playoff streak alive with another slow start like it had in Cleveland.
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