Cleveland Browns: Focusing on Baltimore, Dawg Houses, and Hating Mark Andrews

Stop it. Just stop it. Arizona is over, and the Browns won 27-0, but that was three days ago. It’s now Wednesday morning, so it’s time to start focusing on the Baltimore Ravens.

I don’t want to hear anything more about the Arizona lousy Cardinals, capisce?

But now that it’s Wednesday morning, I scan the Newswire and find that there’s next to nothing regarding scouting reports or other good sources of information about the Ravens.

Except there’s this one site that does videos nearly every night. It’s a little dinky site in the wilderness… yeah, there it is… the “Orange and Brown Report.”

They’ve got a show called “The Dawg House,” where Mike Keefe brings in an expert on the opposing team every Tuesday night and does a deep dive into the upcoming game. There’s a clip of it attached to this tory. 

So, if you want to learn about the Ravens, their weaknesses and tendencies, and so forth from someone who covers them every day, I highly suggest you click right here and spend some time listening while going about your otherwise productive endeavors this morning.

It’s what I did to get myself ready to write this bloviation this morning and prep to host my show, OBR Weekly, this evening with Fred Greetham at 7PM.

When I checked the show out this morning, there were less than a thousand views on it since last night.

That’s criminally underseen for the best preview of the upcoming game against the Ravens — one solid hour of exclusively looking at the Browns’ next opponent from Cleveland’s perspective. It deserves a lot more.

That means I’m not doing my job well enough as head webdork and chief bottle washer of the OBR. More people need to know about these programs and watch them. I have a plan, though. Oh yes.

Not that it’s easy to get heard through all the noise of available sports programming on YouTube.

There are many programs of various merit, most of which follow the now-standard sports talk template of half-informed people shouting inch-deep inanities at each other.

Still, some new YouTube shows are pretty good, while others border on being cartoons. But to each their own.

At any rate, one of the things I learned from watching Mike and his guest, Kevin Oestreicher, talk about the Ravens is that they are a very inconsistent team with a tendency to play to the level of their opponents.

They lost to the Colts and Pittsburgh, struggled against the Cardinals and Titans, and destroyed the Lions and Titans.

Their biggest enemies tend to be themselves. Against the Steelers, who stumble into wins in the most unlikely of ways, dropped passes were the Ravens’ curse. They had thirteen penalties in another game. Lamar Jackson is averaging more than a fumble a game.

Listening to the show convinced me that the Ravens are a very good team but far from the unbeatable juggernaut they looked like against the Seahawks last Sunday.

If the Ravens put together 60 minutes of their best football, they can be very good. But they don’t always do that, and it’s hard to say which version of the team will emerge to face the Browns on Sunday at 1PM.

After football fans were robbed of a classic match-up weeks ago due to a last-minute quarterback change, I expect we’ll see a fantastic game on Sunday.

The Browns defense will face a changed Ravens offense, where Lamar Jackson, under Todd Monken, will take what the defense gives him, generally taking fewer deep shots down the field.

This more efficient Jackson once again has himself in the MVP discussion, and the Browns must be patient against him.

The Ravens’ defense is ranked slightly ahead of the Browns by some measures, a ranking I would argue is partly due to the easy match-up they had with an unprepared Dorian Thompson-Robinson several weeks ago. It will be up to the Browns’ defense to show that they are the top defense in the league this Sunday.

I think they can do it. I can’t wait for this one.

Jake and Andrew are back as they first start off with the Browns’ busy day of transactions.

Then they shift to fielding listener-submitted questions for them to answer on any range of Browns topics from scheme, tendency, or performance to more broad team-based analysis through seven weeks of the NFL season.

Today you get topics on the lack of a third receiver, how opening play-call scripts work, how best to defend Lamar Jackson, favorite Fall season food, and much more.