CLEVELAND, Ohio -- It was a normal Saturday for the Browns, at least for a little while. Left guard Joel Bitonio said they had their morning meeting, got tested -- just doing what they’ve done every Saturday since September.
Then a positive COVID-19 test came back. And the waiting started.
Bitonio prepared like he normally does and got some extra family time, but there was also the uncertainty of not knowing what was happening. There was a positive test, of course, but no one knew what the fallout would be. Or when the team plane would take off.
“We just kept getting pushed back,” he said, “and we just kept getting pushed back until we got the OK that our flight was leaving at 7 p.m.”
In the end, the Browns ended up losing two starting linebackers and their top four receivers after a positive test and contact tracing.
“We really did not find out until we got on the plane and those guys were not there,” Bitonio said.
Myles Garrett said it was just about rolling with the changes.
“Just waiting for the call,” he said. “We will leave that night or tomorrow. Whenever we play, we have to be ready for whenever they want us to be on the field.”
Garrett played on Sunday and started to look like the player who was barreling towards a potential Defensive Player of the Year award before COVID-19 put a stop to his season. He ended a Jets drive with a sack in the first quarter and had what looked like a strip sack in the second quarter. It was called incomplete, negating a touchdown return by Malcolm Smith and the play withstood a replay review.
“They told me on the field that it was too tight to overturn,” Garrett said. “That is my fault that I did not go out there and get another one.”
The story of Sunday was balancing what the Browns had no control over and what they could control. Coachspeak 101 requires learning the sentence, “Control what you can control.”
Kevin Stefanski and his coaching staff conducted a walk-through Sunday morning in a parking garage, a little over 12 hours after they found out they would be without their top receivers and a few hours after losing Jedrick Wills to an illness. They had little time to rework a gameplan they spent all week installing.
“That has nothing to do with the results of this game,” Stefanski said. “We got beat. We had plenty of guys. We had all of the guys we needed, and we did not get it done.”
“It is pretty much 2020 all in 24 hours,” Baker Mayfield said in an abbreviated postgame presser, which was more a statement than a Q&A.
“It sucks that we did not have our guys, but we believe in the guys we have in this locker room, no matter who it is,” Mayfield said. “That is why they are here. That is why they are Cleveland Browns.”
Then: “I have to hold onto the damn ball.”
Mayfield fumbled three times, losing two and the third caused him to come up short on a fourth-down sneak on a potential game-tying drive.
The defense, without their leader, B.J. Goodson and, by the end of the day, two other starting linebackers -- Jacob Phillips was out as a close contact while Sione Takitaki left the game due to injury -- managed to find ways to get off the field in the second half.
The first two-and-a-half quarters, however, were much of what we have seen from this defense throughout the season as the Jets built a 20-3 lead.
“Throughout the entire game, there were just things that I should have done better and plays I should have made,” cornerback Denzel Ward said.
The Browns actually got help from something they couldn’t control when the Steelers came back to beat Indianapolis, the exact result the Browns needed to clinch a playoff berth if they could have taken care of business in their own game. They didn’t. Some of it wasn’t their fault. Some of it was self-inflicted.
No one was making excuses on Sunday after the game, but excuses were there if they wanted them. So much the Browns couldn’t control went wrong.
Then again, the Browns were still the more talented team, especially on offense. They never quite looked like the Browns we’ve come to know over the last four months. It wasn’t all their own fault.
Now it’s one game for the Browns against their division rival at FirstEnergy Stadium to get where they haven’t been since 2002.
After all the things they dealt with this weekend -- the things that happened to them and the things they did to themselves -- they still hold their fate in their own hands. They’re still in control.
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