Back in June, left guard Joel Bitonio, the longest-tenured member of the Cleveland Browns, expressed his excitement at the offense's return to a more zone-based system after having apparently implemented more gap schemes under previous offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey and offensive line coach Andy Dickerson. The zone running game, specifically outside zone, was the bread and butter of the 2020 Browns team that went to the playoffs and nearly toppled the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs. However, through the team's first eight games in 2020, they have run zone at an even lower clip than 2024, so what happened?
The data matches what the film shows; the Browns simply aren't running zone, or even running outside, nearly as much as anticipated. Using stats from Pro Football Focus, we can see an interesting trend. Out of his 118 attempts this season, Quinshon Judkins has run outside the tackles 48% of the time. Jerome Ford was at 40% in 2024, and 53% in 2023. Nick Chubb was at 34% in 2024 and in his last healthy season, 2022, ran outside on 49% of his carries.
These are only the percentage of carries that these backs ran outside the tackles, not the percentage of carries on zone runs. Using Joel Bitonio as our snap count source, we see that Cleveland's zone percentage under Kevin Stefanski is as follows:
2020 - 44.6%
2021 - 35.1%
2022 - 35.4%
2023 - 35.1%
2024 - 52.6%
2025 - 35.3%
So really, when Bitonio says that he's excited to return to more of a 2020/2021 level of zone runs, he's absolutely correct - the Browns are running approximately the same number of zone calls as in 2021. In 2024, despite having an offensive coordinator with heavy gap experience, they had their highest zone rate of Stefanski's tenure. This raises more questions than answers, so we'll need to dig deeper.
Prior to the 2024 campaign, the Browns had to replace esteemed offensive line coach Bill Callahan, who left to coach under his son with the Tennessee Titans. Cleveland brought in Andy Dickerson from the Seattle Seahawks, who they had initially interviewed for the vacant OC job. With the Seahawks, Dickerson ran zone nearly 60% of the time, which is very interesting. You would think that trend would continue in Cleveland, but then again, he was only the OL coach, not the OC or play caller.