Cleveland Browns: Charting the 3 biggest plays from the 2020 season

Breaking down the three biggest plays for the Cleveland Browns in the 2020 season to see what made them successful for the offense. 

On the heels of their dismal 2019 campaign, the Cleveland Browns turned things around tremendously in year one under Kevin Stefanski as the head coach. The former Vikings offensive coordinator — though it took some time — helped to remedy Baker Mayfield and the offense. But it’s always interesting to see where a team had their most success.

As was done with the Miami Dolphins, we’re going to look at the Browns’ biggest plays from the 2020 season. We’re selecting these plays based on the Win Probability Added (WPA) metric, which was outlined in detail in the piece about Miami. In short, it looks at the contribution of a specific play toward the team’s chances of winning the game.

With that in mind, let’s get into the Cleveland Browns’ three biggest plays from this past season.

Cleveland Browns No. 3 best play: Week 13 at Tennessee

The Browns came to Tennessee with a 7-3 record but still with some questions surrounding them. They had struggled against quality opponents and beaten those with losing records. Beating the Titans was a chance to legitimately stake a claim for the playoffs.

The chart doesn’t do enough to fully give credit to how well rookie Donovan Peoples-Jones ran his route. Cleveland was playing with an extremely constricted field. With as many men blocking as possible, they gave a run look. Mayfield faked a handoff to Kareem Hunt and bootlegged to his right. Meanwhile, Peoples-Jones raced straight at his defender, paused as though he was running a comeback, and then continued his go-route down the field.

His defender was lost, the Titans had no one on that side of the field to make the tackle. The end result was a huge, 75-yard touchdown catch-and-run for DPJ.

Cleveland Browns No. 2 best play: Week 14 vs. Baltimore

The Browns played nine one-score games last season and their second matchup against the Ravens was one of them. This matchup was a stark difference from the Week 1 encounter that the Ravens won comfortably. Mayfield was coming into some real form and the Browns entered at 9-3 and with a good chance of finally ending a 20-year playoff drought.

This play came late in the fourth quarter with 1:10 on the clock. It was 42-35 in favor of the Ravens and Mayfield threw a check-down pass to Kareem Hunt, who proceeded to shrug off a defender, race 20 yards and just get the ball over the line as he was being dragged out of bounds.

While the Browns would go on to lose this game courtesy of a last-second field goal from Justin Tucker, this play was instrumental in even giving them a chance at the win as it raised their win percentage by 16.92 points.

Cleveland Browns No. 1 best play: Week 7 at Cincinnati

The Browns came into this AFC North matchup on the back of a thrashing from the Steelers. Cleveland was playing good football overall but was 1-2 against division rivals and the second matchup against the Bengals was a good opportunity to reset and bring that record to .500.

The game was dominated by the quarterbacks. Mayfield threw for 297 yards with a 79 percent completion rate with five touchdowns while Joe Burrow had a career game as well, throwing for 406 yards and three touchdowns. However, it was the fourth quarter that hosted the play in question with the Browns down 34-31 and only 16 seconds left in the game.

Cleveland was running four verticals, an understandable call given how late we are in the game, from the 24-yard line. Mayfield launched a pass that flew past a corner in the end zone and was caught by Donovan Peoples-Jones for the touchdown. This was a perfect pass in the dying moments of the game, a huge play for the Browns given that it added over 50 points to their win percentage.