The Browns had an ugly start to the season with Sunday’s 33-17 loss to the Cowboys, with the offense looking non-competitive for most of the contest.
While Cleveland was playing without its starting offensive tackles, Dallas registered a whopping 17 quarterback hits on Deshaun Watson along with six sacks.
“Yeah, he got hit way too often,” head coach Kevin Stefanski said in his postgame press conference. “We can’t let that happen to him. He fought like crazy, and listen, the football team fought like crazy to the end. But bottom line is, we have to protect our quarterback better than that.”
Watson finished the game 24-of-45 passing for 169 yards with a touchdown and two interceptions.
Also among the many issues, the Browns had several false start and illegal procedure penalties that kept the team in unfavorable down-and-distance situations.
“Yeah, it’s disappointing. We’ll look at ways that we can fix that,” Stefanski said. “We don’t practice that way, you can’t play that way because that’s just, again, it’s hard to win in this league. Don’t want to make it harder on yourself.”
With a new coordinator in Ken Dorsey, the Browns overhauled much of their offense during the offseason. With injuries and Watson coming back from shoulder surgery, the full group didn’t get all that much time together in practice or preseason games. But Stefanski said that’s not an excuse.
“I think we just — there’s things that I know we can do better, things that right away you saw that was not how we wanted to do it, but we had plenty of time to prepare,” Stefanski said. “Just did not get it done today.”
