THE DAILY BLOVIATION
When I was responsible for FOXSportsOhio.com over a decade ago, I had to battle to come up with regular articles about all the teams in the state, college or pro, which wouldn’t be offensive to the teams on our air. For example, it probably wouldn’t make sense for me to write an opinion piece about how much the Dolans sucked as Indians/Guardians owners while the business I worked for had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the team’s broadcast rights. There, I was a bit compromised.
I ultimately decided to leave FOX’s employ after five years because writing generally positive sports articles about flawed franchises was not what I got into the business to do. I wanted to tell the truth as I saw it, and the way to do that was to be completely independent of any conflicts.
So, I exited working with a nice group of people at a cable channel that was essentially doomed as internet streaming and cable unbundling became real problems for them. I then went back to the OBR and had side gigs for a few years at Scout and 247Sports. Until I didn’t.
While at FOX, though, I discovered it was alright to do recaps of power rankings, seemingly present in every sport. I was collating opinions, not stating them, which gave me some distance to tell visitors on the FOX site how their teams were perceived without having to directly say something like, “The Browns are horrible,” even though this was generally true while I was there.
Now there are all kinds of people who read other people’s power rankings and then write their own opinions about them. Among them are the folks at NFL Trade Rumors, who try to consolidate the latest stories into a team-by-team news stream.
Every Tuesday, a large portion of national sites attempt to quantify their opinions about all 32 NFL teams. They give each one a number and write a sentence or two about why, press “Publish,” and pull tons of page views from fans curious about where their team landed. I’ve never met a fan who admits to reading them, but they probably get more clicks than anything I’ve ever written.
This week, the Browns are 4-2, in first place in the AFC North, and own the tiebreaker over the two teams tied with them. Here’s where they rank, depending on where you look. Mike Florio at PFT has them 11th. The Athletic and Nate Davis at USA Today have them 14th. Pete Prisco at CBS, 16th. Ralph Vacchiano at Fox, 17th. Conor Orr at SI, 18th. ESPN’s power panel and Frank Schwab at Yahoo, 19th. And NFL Trade Rumors, which rolls all of these into a weekly “Power Rankings GPA,” puts them 23rd on its own list.
That’s one team, one record and a 12-spot spread. The GPA averages the whole mess out to 17th.
That’s not even the strange part.
Five of those nine rankings have the first-place Browns ranked last in the AFC North: ESPN, SI, Fox, Yahoo and NFL Trade Rumors. Only Florio and Davis rank the Browns first in the division the Browns are actually leading. The GPA composite has the Ravens 10th and the Steelers 16th, both ahead of us. We’ve beaten both of them. That’s what a tiebreaker is.
The Ravens are a special case. They lost to us Sunday, and Yahoo kept them fourth, right where they were. NFL Trade Rumors moved them up four spots to fourth. I’d like to lose to the Browns sometime. It seems to do wonders for your ranking.
Then there are our friends in Los Angeles. The 2-4 Rams are ranked ahead of the 4-2 Browns in six of the nine. My favorite is Davis, who wrote that the Rams “enter a new Bill Parcells reality,” as in “You are what your record says you are,” and then ranked them 13th. The Browns are 14th. Fox, meanwhile, lists the Rams’ Super Bowl odds at +1200, tied for fifth-best in the league. Ours are +20000, tied for 26th. Vacchiano, to his credit, admits he had the Browns 31st after Week 1. He says their “inexcusable loss to the Jets” might be “all that’s holding them back from being a top-10 team.”
Ralph, you have the pen. You’re the one holding them back.
So are they all wrong? I’d love to say yes. But I can’t, entirely.
Schwab has the most honest blurb of the bunch. The Browns are 21st in DVOA, with the offense 29th and the defense ninth, and every win came down to the final minutes. “This is not sustainable, especially with an offense that is 29th in DVOA, which is why they’re not higher than 19th.” He also notes the Browns have the longest betting odds in the division to win it, despite leading it. Scott Petrak has more numbers that sting: 28th in scoring, outscored 122-106 and outgained 1,905 yards to 1,605. John Taylor called that point differential “preposterous” in his Field Script on Monday. If I were ranking a team I didn’t care about with those numbers, I’d probably put them 17th, too.
The trouble is that power rankings can’t decide what they are. Half the time they’re predicting the future and half the time they’re grading the past, so a team that wins ugly lands right in the middle, which is exactly where the Browns are. Florio’s whole explanation for No. 11 was “Szmyt happens, in the bad way before the good way.” Prisco’s, for No. 16: “Can you believe they are in first place in the AFC North after six games? Amazing.” Orr didn’t explain his 18 at all. He used his Browns blurb to suggest Andrew Berry shore up the backup quarterback spot, and his Raiders blurb to wonder whether we’d want Kirk Cousins around to back up or challenge Deshaun Watson. Every one of them is sure he’s right, and hardly any two of them agree.
Even the local TV schedule has an opinion. FestivusPole notes in the Watercooler that the Browns won’t be on TV in Columbus or Dayton Sunday, because Bengals-Ravens is on the same network at the same time. Somewhere in central Ohio, a programming director ranked us behind the Bengals and the Ravens, too.
Todd Monken didn’t mention power rankings at his Wednesday presser, and I’d bet a cold one he hasn’t read one. He talked instead about how “nobody really fantasizes about the work. They fantasize about the win.” The work this week is the Titans, who are 30th in the composite and, as a reporter reminded Monken, haven’t won back-to-back games in nearly four years.
Here’s how this goes. Beat the Titans and the Browns climb a few spots next Tuesday, grudgingly, the way they always do. Lose, and all nine of these guys were right all along, and they’ll say so.
The standings are the only ranking that comes with a playoff spot. In that one, we’re first.
This and that, otherwise...
JERRY BEING JERRY: Scott Petrak has the scene from Sunday’s locker room, where KC Concepcion and Dylan Sampson might have been happier about Jerry Jeudy’s game ball than Jeudy was. Sampson: “As happy as I am for Jerry, the whole day I lost my voice on the sideline.” Jeudy was honest about the reduced role: “I’m a competitor... I would never be OK.” Watson had told him, “Hey, I’m going to need you some of these games, man.” On the trade talk ahead of the Nov. 10 deadline: “You see it, but you can’t do nothing about it.” He also says he told Watson the in-breaking routes were open on that final drive, “and they listened to me.” Listen to him some more, please.
QUICKLY: Fred Greetham writes that Watson’s rating in the last two minutes of each half puts him in elite company, and Jack Duffin looks at what the offense needs for 2027. Fred’s practice check-in is on the OBR YouTube channel. The Browns signed DT Eric Johnson II to the practice squad. And Monken says he had no idea about the team party at Watson’s house until five minutes before his presser. Asked if he got an invite: “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway... they expect us to have a better plan than we had last week.”
Have a good one! GO BROWNS!
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WRAPPING UP
When not ranking his own breakfast options from 1 to 32 with no consistent methodology, Barry McBride is the Publisher and Founder of the OBR and bloviates this nonsense every morning. You can follow him on Twitter @barrymcbride or write him at barry@theobr.com if you are so compelled.
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