This team never makes watching a game easy.
First the penalties. It's early in the season with an entire new coaching staff so hopefully that all gets ironed out. But what surprised me the most about all of those penalties is how many of them were committed by the defense. I mean three penalties on a single play, really? Even ST's was committing a lot of penalties considering their snap count. I would have expected more penalties on that OL and the O in general but that didn't turn out to be the case.
But there was a lot more positives than negatives. This team played with all cylinders firing in the first half. After that initial scoring drive by Pittsburgh it was all Browns until half time.
The second half was a different story. It almost seemed as if nothing was going right. It was beginning to look like the same old story we are all so used to. Watching victory being snatched away by the jaws of defeat. But that didn't happen. When it mattered most and the game was on the line the D held and Watson helped drive them into FG range. Andre Szmyt came through with his 22nd consecutive FG in a row. We haven't had a kicker we could really rely on like that since Phil "Awesome" Dawson.
Denzel Boston looks like he is going to be a force to deal with. We've needed a big bodied, sure hands, physical WR like him for a long while now. It was a missing dimension from this O that is already paying huge dividends.
In the end it was a team win warts and all. Each unit of the team played a part. What appeared to me like the greatest improvement of all in this game was at least a solid spark in the running game. That's a shot in the arm they needed.
