j/c

I've been taking a good bit of time to let this last season sink in while shaking my head at a lot of the absurdity I've been seeing around here of late.
I've come to a few thoughts & conclusions on what I feel we saw, and while I cannot find all of the supporting information I was looking for, I think that if found, the below will bear out.

Baker sucked.
Stefanski sucked.
The OLine sucked; specifically the OT's.
The TE's sucked.
The WR's disappeared.

All of this is aside from the fact that the Defense royally sucked for the first half of the season. Oddly, they are the reason we were in any games at all the second half of the season.

So, what's the likelihood that all of that "offensive suck" is related? I'd think that Occam's Razor says it's very likely. A cascading, compounding effect that we did not - or could not - cover.


The offense came out strong to start the season. We looked good in the opener against the Chiefs. Baker looked good. The OLine and running game AND passing game looked good.
But, we lost Hubbard to a triceps in Week 1. He never came back and we'd later lose him for the season following Week 5. In that same Week 1, Wills had his ankle injury, and Tretter hurt his knee which stayed with him the rest of the season.
In Week 2, Baker got his shoulder trashed.

Offensively, this was pretty much the high water mark of the season. We had some fireworks in Week 5 vs the Chargers, but with the exception of the VERY flukey Week 9 Cinci game where we were gifted a ton of points off turnovers and unlikely big plays, the offense never scored above 30 points again the rest of the season. We lost Conklin for the first time to an elbow dislocation in that Week 5 loss to the Chargers. He came back for the Week 12 Ravens 1 game, but was almost immediately lost again. We much pretty played "Musical Tackles" from Week 5, onward.

So, what's this mean?
I believe that the "OLine Roulette" combined with Baker's injuries led Stefanski to lean more heavily on the 3-TE look than we should have.
I think it is clear as day that the offense we had at the end of the season is NOT the offense we began the season with, and anyone thinking that guys suddenly forgot how to do their thing over the course of a couple of months is completely insane.
I cannot find the personnel grouping stats anywhere that isn't behind a pay wall, but I am expecting that our rate of 13-personnel increased as the season wore on, especially relative to what we used Week 1 and Week 2. I do not believe that the scheme usage we were seeing at the end of the season is what we'd have seen if who we had to send out there was more stable.
The injuries at both OT spots limits what you can do. The injuries at QB have their own impacts. Baker was less accurate, made poor decisions, and appeared to not see things. He had "happy feet" and seemed to lose him mechanics. That, actually, can ALL be attributed to injury and OLine. I have little doubt that he was trying to speed up the clock in his head because he couldn't really trust the protection. I also have absolutely zero doubt that the injury forced changes to how he throws. Face it, when you're hurt and you try to use the part of your body that is hurt, your nerves and pain receptors force you into compensatory movements that allow you to approximate what you're doing, but by no means will you be able to do it as well as you could if you weren't injured.
I think that these aspects combined sort of "poisoned" Stefanski's choices and judgements in game planning and play calling. I think it caused him to go far more conservative than he would have, otherwise. We stopped trying to go vertical as much, or we just consistently failed at trying to. Designed rollouts and attempts at Play Action seemed to decrease dramatically. We inexplicably failed to lean more heavily on Nick Chubb even when we weren't playing the Ravens who were particularly good at shutting him down. The only really puzzling thing is with how frequently we went 13-personnel, yet didn't give the OT's help from a TE, letting them flounder against some of the best pass rushers in the league. Perhaps this is part of the attempts at misdirection or keeping the defenses guessing, but in the end, I think it just made us incredibly predictable as we did it to a fault, and it also put a target on the QB's back and caused him to get moved off his mark more frequently.

We've seen that this offense CAN be explosive.
We've seen that the TE's CAN be big play threats.
We've seen that Stefanski CAN be aggressive and use more vertical WR packages.
We've seen that Baker CAN execute every throw there is with a high degree of accuracy and success.
We've seen that the OLine CAN be the absolute best in the league.

We saw VERY LITTLE of any of that this year, and even less where it all happened in a single game, and what we did see of it was almost entirely toward the start of the season..... so, what's that mean when trying to pin all our woes on a single point of failure like we keep seeing so much of on here?

The simple fact is that this past season was undone by a number of factors, and most of those factors were issues that turned areas of the team that were team strengths into liabilities.

We had the best OLine in football at the start of the season. At the end of the season they almost got Baker killed.
We had a Top 5 QB at the start of the season, but now folks are trying to convince us that he's Manziel II, even despite a name like Bernie Kosar commenting publicly on how almost impossible it is to throw accurately with that brace/sling on.
We had the reigning NFL Head Coach of the Year at the start of the season, but now folks (self included here in the past few weeks) have said we'd be perfectly ok if he was canned.
We went into the season feeling like we had one of the best WR groups in the league, only to have our blinders ripped off our faces and be forced to look directly at the fact that we had one charlatan, one WR, and a bunch of JAGs.
We thought we were set at TE only to end up completely misusing them and making them look like underperforming trash.

Add in littler things like missing Kareem Hunt for half the season, the Mysterious & Amazing Disappearing Acts of Rashard Higgins and a defense that easily cost us most every loss in the first half of the season and it is not a wonder in the least why we are at home in January.

I do not believe that Stefanski wants to ship Baker out.
I do not think that Baker wants out.
I do not think that Baker cannot, and will not, have incredible success in Cleveland, with Stefanski. What was is not necessarily how things are. By that, I mean that just because we saw what we saw this year, it doesn't mean that it is how things are, and certainly not how things will be.
We saw what we saw for much of the season due to choices and reactions to challenges and circumstances. We saw what we saw at the start of the season because of what we can do when we aren't being undone.