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Crusty's Corner: Bryan takes a look at the Cleveland Browns Offense
Thank you, Lucius G back nation here on one oh five three the fan time now for crusty's corner. It's brought you by reliant air conditioning gimmick free AC repair and replacement. Here's Brian. Thank you very much, Cheryl. I appreciate that. Thank you to reliant as well for being part of this. If you're new to the broadcast, this is the part where I take a look at the opponent the weekly opponent for your Dallas Cowboys through the through the offense generally on a Wednesday and the defense on a Thursday and then we'll do the referees on Friday. So just try and get you ready for this broadcast this week coming up in the game. So hopefully you get something out of this. If you're into the podcasting scene, just got a new Bobby and I did a love of the star that's posted. So after our show today, feel free to give it a listen and tell us what you think, but we're really proud of what we've done there. And it should be three of those a week for you now that the season started. So hopefully everybody will take a take a listen to that as well. Okay. This is Cleveland Brown offense and and what the little bit of some of the struggles you'll go through early is because you don't have a lot of games. You have to go back and say watch games. And what I did was I went back and watched the games where DeShawn Watson was actually healthy enough to play and then he got hurt. So then you have to kind of deal with that the shoulder problems and things that he was dealing with that caused him to miss the majority of the season last year. But I went back and watched the games that he was able to play and how the team responded. I will point this out that before we get going, I think yesterday I talked about this a little bit yesterday. Bless you, Eric, by the way. I did talk about running game. Moses no longer being there for the Cleveland Browns. Yeah. Office of line coach Bill Callahan. Yeah. And and so they've replaced him with a guy named Andy Dickinson and Andy was with them. He was with Seattle the last several years, but he was a guy that was at Cleveland and went on to beat Seattle's line coach and then they bring him back. And they brought him back. So, you know, that's something that, you know, you keep an eye on. With I think Bill Callahan, I had the utmost respect for. I think that everywhere Billy's been, you know, with the exception of the head coach and stuff at Nebraska, he is when he's the offensive line coach, he's going to be creative. If you're going to have a physical front, you're going to be able to run the football. He just, he just makes players better. And this crew right here is always run game. Really never recovered. Yeah. I mean, they've Dallas had some really some good players when you look back at with Ron Leary and Frederick and guys like that, Doug free, Doug free. I mean, he did. He took a, he took a group of guys that have talent, but boy, I mean, he made them even better. And I think he did the same thing to help this Cleveland Brown offensive line. But I'm going to talk about Deshawn Watson first, because when you look at Watson, the thing that I noticed with him is he's not always just accurate. He did have the, if you look at metrics, he was the fourth lowest when it came to completion percentage. He was at 45% when he was under pressure. So if you find ways to get to him, and I'm going to tell you a couple of ways, I think you can get to him, but he's a guy that makes receivers work for the ball. He's got a really over the top throwing delivery as like he's up on his toes. And sometimes it causes the ball to sail on him a little bit. He's got some guys that, you know, I'm Mario Cooper. We all know I'm Mario Cooper. He's a good bad ball catcher. There's several times you see guys running routes, and he's throwing the ball and they're having to go down to get it. We're still in the ball. It's too high. He's got arm talent. There's no question. He just doesn't know where the ball is going to go. And what I have to think about the Cowboys need to think about is you have to guard against his ability to scramble. That's, that's where I think that, that when Kevin Stafansky, the, you know, the head coach, primary play caller, Ken Dorsey's now in the building with them as a, as a coach, as the office coordinator, Ken Dorsey did a good job of working with, with, with Allen, Josh Allen and his accuracy problems in college. So I guess that's why you bring a guy in like this, trying, trying to help him become a more accurate quarterback. But I mentioned you have to guard against that scramble because he'll run out of the pocket if he senses trouble at all. You know, you have to bring him down in the pocket. This guy is strong enough to shake off poor tackling. You know, you get around him and all of a sudden it's an arm tackle. He'll just, he'll just push you aside and keep going. So you got to make it, make sure it's not a weak tackle. You get an opportunity to bring him down, bring him down. I felt like he could be a little late with the ball to the outside. It gives DB's the opportunity to drive on a lot of his passes. And I think it makes it far more contested catches than probably what you want from your quarterback. Mari Cooper, I mentioned him we, he's going to play in the slot. He's also going to play in the outside. He's quick out of the break. He will lull you to sleep and then he'll just explode in his route. So how, how they match him up maybe inside with some Jordan Lewis, you know, will Jordan Lewis be able to handle his quickness? Will Carson when they put him on the outside? When you look at Cooper, Cooper is one of the best receivers in the league when it comes to sideline catches. He works with such small space on the outside and you think you got him covered and he'll make a play. He'll just extend and then tap, tap out of bounds. He'll go. It's brilliant. The adjustment that he's you think that's the play for them. You get a Mari Cooper match up against the rookie and you pick on Carson until he knows he can go. I think to me personally, the guy that I would pick on is Lewis is so I would pick on. I would put a Mari. I would make Lewis have to cover all the ground and just let and let Cooper run route. Interesting. You know, when you when you play the slot, you're more open to use. You can use the whole field. When you play on the outside, you tend to have to maybe sure they can use the sideline. But I was telling it about Cooper. We've all seen him. It's his ability to adjust on the sidelines. It is really, really impressive. You know, he's he's the best when you put him on those vertical routes, the post routes, the corner routes, the go routes, those are the routes that he really, really will excel out as well. But you know, this, this, I think where you look at maybe the place to attack this group. Now they've got some questions on their, their offensive line. And they've got questions at their offensive tackles and their offensive tackle. When a Judrick Wills, he's not been completely healthy with a knee and then Jack Conklin is another one that's been dealing with injury as well. They've struggled with that. Dewan Jones had been a backup last year and he played a lot of games for the, for the Browns last season. And he's a guy that if Conklin or that Willis can't go, then you'll see him in the action. So there's some questions about their offensive tackles availability. We got the injury report just a little bit ago. They were both limited in their reps to practice today. We'll just keep an eye on that. That's huge, man. I mean, questions with the health on the O line, shuffle and things around perhaps losing the best offensive line coach in the sport in this off season. You don't have Nick Chubb in the backfield. I understand the guy who's replacing him with solid last year. Yeah, Jerome Ford, but I mean, and then you factor in a bad quarterback. I mean, my gosh. Well, and Mary Kay Caban, who was on this morning with Sean and RJ, neither of those tackles have practiced at all. Yeah. And you know what? That's, that's clearly the focus. I think if they do play, then we'll see how they're, how well they play without the reps that they've had for the training camps and things like that. I think that Willis is a better player than Conklin myself. When you watch him, he's gotten better. You watch him, the, the left tackle, the reps that he's taken and he could be pretty oppressive. He's very athletic with, and he's gotten better each year where I feel like you need to attack these guys. This is his spot. I don't think Wyatt Teller, the right guard is particularly good. I don't think he handles power all that well. And then Ethan Posek, the center, neither one of them, when they have to deal with combo blocks or they have to deal with twist stunts or any type of games inside, neither one of them play with very much strength. Welcome to Mike Zimmer's double A gap. I think that that's exactly, I would not be surprised. And both teams, I think are going to do this when both defenses, I could very well see covering these guards up and then letting like Ethan Posek go one on one with hat when they go with against Michael Parsons. Yeah. And Parsons see if he could win that matchup with him because we've seen the double A gap blitz stuff with Zimmer. But if, if, and I think the Browns are going to do the same thing to the BB, I think they're going to cover both your guards and put and then, and put, you know, and put Garrett on that, on that over the center. Well, Stefanski was Zim's OC in Minnesota. Right. So they know each other very, very well. They do know each other well. And, but to me, it's the right guard in the center of the two guys that I kind of feel like you need to attack on this offensive line. When you, when I feel like that they're tied in is a good player, David and Joku, I think is a good player where you're going to deal with him is in the flat mainly. That's where a lot of his catches are boots, swaggles screen. Screen game is huge for these guys. And I have a feeling with Watson, if they're going to try and kind of make him feel comfortable, just they're going to have to, they're going to have to understand that David and Joku, it's block, block, block and then get out, he's block blocking. You know, so now you're kind of lulled asleep thinking he's going to stay in and protect. And now he's out in the flat and they're going to catch the ball. But he's a guy that's really, really good at catching it, getting up the field. He's an athletic tight end and he can make some things happen for the running back. They'll do things. They'll get you an 11 personnel. They'll try and spread you out and then hand the ball to these backs and let them just work off that. A lot of that zone blocking stuff where they'll get, it's a gap to them. And then they'll just take that gap and then they'll let the backs cut off that. So a lot of different things they could do. But I think losing their line coach will hurt them. The questions of some health at the tackle, the lack of accuracy, a quarterback and some weakness on the inside at their positions at their guard in their center. I think that bodes well for the Cowboys in this matchup. Well, thank you, Brian. Thank you. Getting some great reaction on text, the eight one seven. I think Brian just said we're about to face Trey Lance. And I'm good with that. Brought us as the goat says the two one four with the info been looking forward to the pregame analysis during the week. It is back. What are we doing tomorrow, Brian? That would be the Browns defense. And I've already taken a peek at them. And so said, there's going to be some things. You think that you have some advantages on against their offense. That would be true. They've had some bandages against you on their defense. So it'll be it'll be something we'll talk about tomorrow. And we'll get into that tomorrow at three 40 here in the nation, brought you by a Reliant. Little sports hodgepodge coming up, chief. Yes, sir. Let the gamesmanship begin in Ann Arbor plus a new installment of why you got to bring up old stuff next year in the nation.