Offensive turnovers and miscues hurt drives
After a strong opening drive in which the Browns scored their lone touchdown of the day, they struggled on the offensive side of the ball – only scoring once more on a field goal from K Andre Szmyt in the third quarter.
The Browns particularly struggled in the pass game, as QB Joe Flacco completed 16 of 34 passing attempts and threw two interceptions. His first interception occurred in the first quarter on a third-and-8, as Flacco looked for WR Cedric Tillman on the pass, it was intercepted by S Kerby Joseph. His second happened towards the end of the first half as Flacco looked for WR Jerry Jeudy, but the pass was picked off by CB D.J. Reed.
Flacco also turned the ball over in the fourth quarter on a fumble after he was sacked by DE Aidan Hutchinson, who recorded the strip sack, and the fumble was recovered by LB Trevor Nowaske.
“We made mistakes,” Flacco said. “The first pick was on me, and anytime you give a chance to give this team a little bit of momentum and play from the lead, that makes them that much better. That’s part of the reason why they’re a good football team. So, when you turn the ball over like that and you give them good position and you don’t really allow our defense to pin their ears back and do their thing, then you’re going to struggle as a whole. I don’t know about that second one. I really didn’t – you know that set them up too. I really didn’t think that they came up with that, but in the box score, they did, and it hurt us.”
Multiple pass catchers also had dropped passes at key moments – including Jeudy who caught three of his nine targets, WR Isaiah Bond who caught three of six targets and TE Harold Fannin Jr. who completed two of his six targets. Flacco said on their first drive, they were able to win their one-on-one-matchups and get after their assignments better. However, as the game continued – while they were able to take shots down the field – they couldn’t sustain drives.
Stefanski acknowledged the puzzling nature of the dropped passes, as he is not seeing those types of drops in practice. However, because of the developing trend of dropped passes in games, he knows it’s an area of focus to fix moving forward.
“Part of being good in the pass game is having precision,” Stefanski said. “That includes everything and everything you do, and we obviously have to clean that up.”