Cleveland Browns: Win vs. Bills both crucial and meaningless

The Cleveland Browns winning ugly over the Bills isn’t going to change their 2019 fate but the victory remains important for the franchise nonetheless.

Aside from a few Baker Mayfield darts, including the game-winning touchdown pass to Rashard Higgins, few things about the Cleveland Browns‘ win over the Buffalo Bills in Week 10 was pretty. For a team that has completely missed the target, much less come close to the bullseye, of expectations this season, that’s largely been the case all year.

To be sure, it was a productive game for Mayfield (26-of-38, 238 yards, two touchdowns), Nick Chubb (20 carries, 116 yards) and Jarvis Landry (nine receptions, 97 yards, one touchdown) and the defense played well enough. However, this was still not the potentially dominant Browns team that we’d hoped to see this year.

Perhaps the best example of the ugly play for the Browns came midway through the first quarter. After driving 60 yards, Cleveland had eight chances from the 1- or 2-yard line to score. With some questionable play calls (namely predictable runs for Chubb) and some admittedly good defensive plays, the Browns failed to get any points from that trip.

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Moreover, the Browns needed a missed 53-yard field goal from Steven Hauschka with 22 seconds to secure the 19-16 win. It was not a banner day for the Browns by any stretch, particularly for Freddie Kitchens and Todd Monken.

At the end of the day, though, it’s a win. It’s a win that ends a four-game losing streak. It’s a win over a team that was 6-2 coming into this game and a win at FirstEnergy Stadium. That’s an enormous step forward for the Browns who have failed to perform at home and against good teams (and some bad teams) this season.

Through the scope of the 2019 season, it should be said that the Browns winning in Week 10 may not mean much at all. They are still only 3-6 on the season and, to conceivably have a chance at making the playoffs in the AFC, they’d likely have to win their next seven games to complete an eight-game winning streak.

Ultimately, that seems both unlikely and near-impossible for a team that has been as sloppy as the Browns this season. Beating the Bills is mostly just a way to stop the bleeding for now and keep the season from being a disaster through 10 weeks.

But that’s important in the long-term view of the Cleveland Browns. When you look at how everything has broken down with this team, the toll that it’s taken on players like Mayfield, Odell Beckham Jr. and many others has been obvious. And a four-game losing streak that they were unfortunately riding coming into this matchup was only compounding the issue.

Getting a win against a potential playoff team, though, is something that can be built on. Again, they have a multitude of issues that need to be cleaned up still, and perhaps the biggest part of that would indeed be shaking up the coaching staff.

Even if Kitchens, Monken and Steve Wilks are gone after 2019, though, the players are largely going to remain intact as it pertains to the core of this team. And the last thing that this franchise needs is a core group that gets mired in the dysfunction and malaise of a losing season where they let everyone down. Sunday’s win gives them hope to break out of that funk.

So yes, the Browns are almost surely not beginning a run to the postseason because they beat the Bills. However, for Cleveland beyond 2019, which there should still be hope for, the Week 10 victory is something incredibly valuable. It’s something that can help salvage what amounts to a lost season for the Dawg Pound by giving them something to hang their hat on.