After the Cleveland Browns‘ 21-18 win over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday, one of the glaring issues that stood out for the team was, as coach Todd Monken likes to say, “Browns hurting Browns.” In this case, it was the 12 penalties the Browns incurred that consistently watered down the drives of the offense, which is still limited by inexperience and mediocre talent. No one was more the poster player for those mistakes than Tytus Howard, the veteran right tackle whose trade and $45 million contract was the start of the team’s effort to rebuild the offensive line this winter.
Monken was blunt in lookin at the penalties after the game. He said: “We had no excuses. We were at home. That’s embarrassing.”
Tytus Howard: ‘I Didn’t Like That’
Howard spoke this week about the team’s mistakes, especially his own. The Browns look competitive at 2-1 heading into Thursday’s game against the Steelers, but their margin of victory is still slim. They can’t afford to keep up the mistakes.
Howard explained the three false-start penalties he got, almost in succession: “It’s like a snap anticipation. They said I was leaving a hair early, you know, so I gotta fix it. I can’t complain. Maybe I thought I wasn’t offsides, maybe a lot of people think I wasn’t offsides, but they call it, that means I was offsides. I can’t complain about it now. It already happened. Just gotta go this week and not let the same thing happen because it is a drive killer.
“It’s bad to get that many. It happened once, all right, cool. But three times, you know, that’s a problem. … Me, myself, I hold myself to a high standard, you know, being a focal point, the focal point of that in the last game was, I didn’t like that.”
Browns Offense Could Be More Productive
The Browns did manage to top 20 points in the last two weeks, against the Buccaneers and the Panthers, and Howard said the offensive numbers should grow if the players focus on cutting back penalties.
Howard said: “I am just going to do a better job of being more conscious of how the referee is seeing it when he gets off the ball. Cleaning up the pre-snap penalties is the No. 1 priority as he said all week. We fix the pre-snap penalties and the penalties in general, and our offense should be way better than it has been. To put up 20-something points in multiple weeks with the penalties we have had is a testament in itself, that if we eliminate those we can put even more points out.”
Browns $45 Million Starter Sounds Off on ‘Embarrassing’ Mistakes