CLEVELAND — All week leading into their game with the Green Bay Packers, Browns coach Kevin Stefanski had his players passing out compliments to each other. The goal was to stress the complementary piece of football that helps teams win.
The biggest compliment finally came on game day, when the Browns showed just enough complementary football to somehow emerge as a 13-10 winner over the Packers. That’s even if most of it had to wait until there was almost no time left to it to happen.
“This is how you win games,” defensive end Myles Garrett said. “It’s not always going to be pretty, it’s not always going to be a shootout and we can’t always hold ’em to zero. There are going to be games where everybody’s needed, and as you saw, it took everybody.”
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The play to give the Browns their first win of the season was a 55-yard field goal by kicker Andre Szmyt. The same kicker who missed both a point-after kick and a field goal to cost Cleveland its opener against the Cincinnati Bengals, as well as who wasn’t certain to kick against Green Bay due to a calf injury two days earlier.
To get to that play, it required two other things, each with their own degree of difficulty. It needed the defense to do what it had been doing all day, which was turning the Packers away, this time with a blocked field goal with 21 seconds remaining.
That blocked field goal was coupled with a Grant Delpit interception the previous Packers possession, the first takeaway of the season for a Browns defense that had done most everything else right. That included the five sacks of Green Bay quarterback Jordan Love, the 230 total yards allowed, the 81 net rushing yards and the 10 total points.
“Emphasis on getting the ball back to our offense this week,” Delpit said. “Complementary football. Shout out, man, what about Andre? Can we talk about him? Man, what a kick? Something made out of a movie, man. So that’s one. Gotta keep doing it.”
The other part was a little more complicated, because it involved an offense that had spent the better part of the game struggling to do much of anything. And yet, in the final 21 seconds, it managed to get just enough yards to give Szmyt a chance.
Most impressively, it came with the Browns not only running a play with 12 seconds remaining that saw quarterback Joe Flacco find tight end David Njoku for an eight-yard gain, in the middle of the field and without any timeouts. Yet, they were able to get the ball spiked with two seconds left to allow for Szmyt’s big moment.
“Yeah, you go in and you tell everybody, Hey, we got to get down,” Flacco said. “We got to clock it here. So get down, clock, and then you give ’em the play and you trust on the fact that you’ve practiced it a million times, at the end of the day, in training camp and throughout the spring and all that.”
The Browns being able to run what they had practiced a million times, at least on offense, had been much easier said than done this season. That was especially true for the first 56 minutes against Green Bay.
Cleveland’s first seven possessions resulted in no points and only seven total first downs. Also, a whole lot of boos, which rained down as hard as the actual rain that fell for a moment early in the fourth quarter.
“You’re human,” said Flacco, who finished 24-of-36 for 142 yards with an interception. “There’s a piece of you in there that it hurts you a little bit. You want to react to it, but you can’t. … I’m sure that affects people in not a positive way, but you got to be able to rally and at least put on, at least fake it, and then go out there and bring it to life.”
It came to life for the offense starting with rookie running back Quinshon Judkins’ 38-yard run to start the Browns’ eighth possession with just over eight minutes left. That drive ended Cleveland’s scoring drought with 3:38 remaining on a 35-yard field goal by Szmyt to pull it within 10-3.
The pick came off the arm of a quarterback in Love who spent all day with Browns defenders in his face and seemed to be anticipating more when he threw a ball near Delpit’s shins that the safety turned into a first-and-goal situation for his offense. One play later, Judkins powered in to tie the game at 10-10 with 3:01 remaining.
“Our defense is tremendous. you know, when they’re on the field they get a stop,” said Judkins, who finished with 94 yards on 18 carries. “They have that attitude and grit. I give them credit for the win.”
The final compliment to the complementary football the Browns found at just the right time for their first win.
Chris Easterling can be reached at ceasterling@thebeaconjournal.com. Read more about the Browns at www.beaconjournal.com/sports/browns. Follow him on X at @ceasterlingABJ
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Ultimate ‘complement’: Browns pull it all together in time to stun Packers
Reporting by Chris Easterling, Akron Beacon Journal / Akron Beacon Journal
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