The Browns starting offense had two good preseason performances before laying an egg against the Colts on Saturday.
They produced just three points as quarterback Brandon Weeden went 12-of-25 for 105 yards in his time on the field. Since the third game is generally seen as a dress rehearsal for the regular season, the performance led some to wonder if the offense is going to be able to produce when the games start to count. Weeden isn’t one of those people.
He said that he’s not pushing the panic button off of one bad performance and that the team will learn from the mistakes in order to play better in the future.
“That’s just people being creatures of habit,’' Weeden said, via Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “You lose a game and everyone wants to [panic]. But the attitude in here has been great all day, so it’s not in this room. We’re excited. We saw the mistakes, but they’re all fixable. This locker room is excited. That one’s behind us and now we’re looking forward to Chicago [Thursday] and it’s going to be here before we know it.”
It’s unwise to read too much into anything that goes on in preseason games, good or bad, so panic should certainly be off the table at this point in time. That seems especially true in this contest, which featured fewer plays down the field and fewer plays out of the shotgun than the Browns employed in the first two games. The offense is working on different things to explore how well they work and offensive coordinator Norv Turner isn’t detailing specific plans for the opposition, two things that won’t be the case come the regular season.
No one’s quite sure how the Browns offense will wind up looking this season and they won’t until the calendar has moved far beyond August.