We, Browns fans, have read about how well respected this coaching staff is, the head coach won "Coach of the Year" in his first season, the line coach is talked and written about as a genius. AND, although the head coach warned last year isn't this year, WE, the fan's were not expecting 4-4 so far. GETTING to the point, who is accountable for all the penalties. The players play, yet the coaches are suppose to prepare them for playing. I want bone headed penalties to COST the million dollar athletes. When you stop a drive with stupidity, it should cost you in your wallet and put them on the bench....JMHO. The coaches own some of this too.....we are leading the league in penalties. Or close to it, games are lost due to it...make sure accountability is done in practice not just with lip service......GO Browns!!!!

Yeah, it’s been a failure across the board. Think about the losses:

KC - defense let us down, so did STs and Chubb (and, yes, poor coaching decisions)
LAC - our defense was a straight embarrassment
AZ - I felt we were totally out prepared this game
PIT - they were tougher up front and our playmakers folded

The coaches should just tell the players not to get penalties anymore.

I agree that it is on the players and the coaches... I can understand the PI call or the holding call or the face mask call or even the questionable late hit call when you are in the flow of the play and sometimes things just happen, but we are leading the league in pre-snap penalties, the kind that drive us all nuts because they are just lack of focus, lack of preparation.. These players are professionals, they aren't 12 year old kids so on some level, they should be accountable to themselves and to each other... but if that isn't working then the coaching staff has to look at themselves and what kind of discipline they are demanding and what they are doing about it. I really don't think that other teams just draft and sign players who are more disciplined, I think it can be strongly influenced by the culture around the team every day of accountability.

We average 3 more penalties for over 20 yards more per game than the teams that are doing well in penalties... that's a couple first downs per game, a couple drives killed (or extended for the opponent), that leads to decreased chances to score for us and increased chances to score for them... We just aren't good enough to overcome that week after week, especially against good teams. Most teams aren't.

I think I'm going to watch a couple more games before I go all Chicken Little on this one. We are still looking at a better season than many of the dumpster fires of previous years. It's not panic time yet. Panic very rarely works anyway.

Completely agree, but also want to add in the couple of stupidity penalties (Harrison's hit out of bounds that offset a big Pitt penalty).

The Harrison penalties are worse than the holding calls or PI calls IMO

Agreed. Just dumb, knuckleheaded penalties.

I think that was a good play by Harrison, I want him making a hit there, not playing timid. He can't always be looking at the floor to see where the out of bounds marker is, sometimes you have to play the ball, assume he's in bounds, and lay the wood on the opposing player in a legal way
because otherwise he stands there to let a player score?. No, can't have that.

I posted this in the PostGame thoughts (Steelers) thread. Fits here too IMO:

I re-watched Q4 yesterday...because I love to punish myself.

When Baker was cheap-shotted by that turd Haden...Baker landed at the feet of Garrett and McDowell at the bench....neither one of those guys got off their butts to help and or hype. No one on the sideline got in Haden's face...as a matter of fact...one of our guys exchanged 'fives' with Haden.

We are still soft.

JMHO, Baloney, a professional football player has to know where the out of bounds is....Harrison's penalty is the EXACT thing I typed about. He cost us bigtime and should be fined by the club for being STUPID. Maybe the club does that and we fans don't need to know. I expect our guys to nail the other team legally. We all human, but come on. Maybe they should internally have to wear the stupid T shirt under their uniform.....players would know, nobody would want to wear it....sort of like the 'gold necklace' some teams have for great legal hit.....I hate stupid plays. Go Browns!!!

There's a new collegiality among NFL players now that wasn't nearly as prevalent in the old days, probably because of the money players make now. On a similar play to the one you described back in the late 70's/early 80's, Jack Lambert took a similar cheap shot on Brian Sipe at the sideline and he immediately disappeared under a sea of Browns' jerseys. Lambert came out of that pile staggering, with the ear hole of his helmet covering part of his face - a message to opponents trying to take out your QB was sent. Not the case any more. Now we have love fests on the field after the game; jersey exchanges, gold shoes gifted to oppo QBs, and losers yukking it up with the guys who just kicked their ass.

After the game is fine. It shows sportsmanship. These players are all in the league and represented by the same union. All of them could see their careers end with the next snap of the ball. There's a commonality between every NFL player that doesn't exist outside the game. But for those four quarters it's a war. We weren't seeing people not stand up for Baker when he was hit that way before. Being "soft" just sounds like a convenient excuse to me. We know there are rifts within the team. Some seem to think the entire problem was OBJ but I think we will end up finding it may very well run deeper than that.

Sending OBJ down the road was a strong message to the entire team. I think in the end it was a good one. Get on board and give it everything 100% of the time or you're gone! But I don't think the message was just for OBJ. Not standing up for your QB when he takes a cheap shot is a lot more than "being soft" or "an OBJ thing". When a team is winning and feeling good about themselves everything is sunshine and roses. When it starts to feel like the wheels are falling off, not so much. After all the dysfunction we've seen here over the past two decades I thought surely Browns fans would have figured that part out by now.

I think anyone demanding accountablility needs to take a look in the mirror. Anyone riding in on too high of a horse isn't being humble enough.

Well, JMHO, we STILL haven't gotten the stupidity under control...Elliot get unsportsman? on the bench....how many penalties....GREAT\ we lead the league in penalties. Go Browns!!!

3rd quarter, and we are winning....yet penalties, penalties, penalties.....ain't we a great professional team. They will kill us in a close game. Large fines can be used to buy school supplies for needy kids. Go Browns!!!

I watched that replay over a couple of times, and still can't see why he was flagged

Especially since those are almost always offsetting penalties as a warning to both teams... unless one player does something egregious... I saw nothing at all.

Agreed. I couldn’t see anything. Maybe he said something?

15 yards on the Defense for saying mean things.

I'm glad we won the game.....I'm disappointed we either lead the league or are very close to number of yds given away due to penalties. McDowell leads our team with penalties....his offsides/over the line/lining up are just attention to detail. Coaches need to harp on it....on to NE.....GO Browns!!!

I thought it was the refs making up for not throwing the flag on Clowney for the Burrow hit. As little as that makes sense, it makes more sense than anything that happened in the scrum after.

When this happens I wonder about the merits of having a coach placed at the LOS looking for guys line up in the neutral zone. Maybe it would clog the sidelines but if they have a coach assigned to be the get back guy, why not.

That wouldn't work inside the 30's, and really?? It isn't that hard to line up onsides.

Apparently it is tough for some of our DL.

I watched it without sound but from the replay, he didn't appear to do anything any more egregious than what 4 or 5 other guys were doing. Unless he said something..

It just struck me as odd that the whole Bengals OL charged over right up against the Browns sideline and started jawing and the Browns got the penalty.

I think I'm correct with this statement....Jimmy Johnson told Bill B., if I ever draft a dumb guy again, his me in the head with a hammer....you can't fix stupid. Like I said, some old school fix might work...make/ask the guy to wear the stupid T shirt.....won't happen....thank God, our HC FINALLY mentioned it, penalties...also Brownswire shows we've been hurt the most by penalties. Go Browns!!!!

We can't afford to have many more scrums.....hope the team is reviewing its COVID protocols. Here is hoping no more of our players come down with covid. JMHO, I've very surprised the NFL hasn't had more people/players test positive....we have ALL been a little slack.....covid isn't over.....GO Browns!!!!

we should hold the refs accountable

I agree 100 percent....yet, they are graded, just like the troops in trenches....wonder if they are fined. JMHO, they should be, the guy/guys/gals who didn't call the pass interference, the folks in NY, the nerve center should be fined. Just like HC and the chart says, we have GOT to FIX the penalties or we lose.......GO Browns!!!

I'm not going to argue with you on the Pitt part of that tweet, but a very significant portion of the flags against us have been procedural (per # of flags, maybe not counting by penalty yards). That speaks more to us.

To be clear, I don't disagree with the refs needing to be held accountable. Based on what I can see, there's absolutely zero accountability with those guys. Just the NFL circling the wagons around them. A ref crew can do something like this past MNF, and just be trotted right back out there the next week like nothing happened. That's not right.

Maybe we could start with allowing the press to have access to the refs after the game

That probably wouldn't be productive. There are few I'd trust to actually take them to task. Cle local media would just ask them their favorite color or about OBJ or Lebron.

I think a good step would be an actual transparent accountability process, and one with real consequences. I get that their rating rewards the better ones with playoff and SB opportunities, but what about the ones that are consistently bad (or even, out of step with the other crews... a HUGE underlying problem is that you have crews that like to go rogue on certain calls and call the same flag differently).

Boston Dynamics has their robots dancing and doing parkour and stuff. If our current refs aren't capable or allowed to use common sense when throwing flags, then the argument against using computer/robots out there erodes fast. I'm only half joking.

Interesting our HC finally addressed the problem....too many penalties, he correctly correlates them to losing. I found it interesting as much as we bad mouth the Steelers, not they benefit most from penalties AND they are COVID free this season while we have several high value folks out. Wonder if we should send a team during the off season to their facilities and find out how to do things right.....truth hurts.....GO Browns!!!!

Have you ever tried to tackle a robot. If it's robots, why not just go full computer game system and end the NFL for human beings.

Find out how they CHEAT...are they the only team without a COVID 19 positive???

I'm probably over simplifying this,, but it seems to me that there is a solution. Penalty called, review by NY... It's upheld or it's not..

I get the idea. I do however think it would slow down the game to an unwatchable crawl.
Did you mean to suggest every call on the field?
What then does the league do with coaches' challenges?

hmmmm- so many new questions.
tidy li'l can o'worms you opened, D.

I think in NY they could look at most penalties in a matter of seconds, while the teams are going about their business getting ready for the next play. Only the most egregious errors would need to be overturned and the fans, generally, wouldn't even know it was going on.

My question is not about the penalties that are called, it's about the penalties that are NOT called. If, for instance, somebody like... oh I don't know... maybe Myles Garrett is coming around the edge and the guy is bear hugging his neck and it's not called, do the people in NY have the ability to call the ref and tell him to drop the flag after the play?

There was a play toward the end of the game last night where they called PI on the Dolphins as the refs were desperately trying to make sure the Ravens stayed within one score.. it wasn't a horrible call but when they showed the replay of Lamar moving to his left to throw the ball, clearly one of the Ravens OL had a firm grasp on the jersey of one of the Dolphins DL who was trying to get to Lamar... does NY have the ability to call down and say, "Make it offsetting."????

I've been curious as to this new "eye in the sky" approach to replays and it's actual "guardrails"... particularly after the bogus roughing call against us (no flag, penalty called down to the field). Can't remember which game it was, feel like it was against PIT but can't find it in the play-by-play... anybody remember which game??

Anyway, I ran across this, and it's pretty informative...

http://www.footballzebras.com/2021/...of-replay-that-could-have-mixed-results/

That page makes me even angrier at that call as this is the verbiage concerning interrupting play to impose penalties, etc:


Article is definitely worth a quick read as it also discusses new technology that allows lightning quick reviews.

Things like that don't happen in our games, do they?