A funny thing happened while everyone was focused on Deshaun Watson’s absence.
A Browns team that was on the ropes has come together. And that much was obvious to me Saturday afternoon when I asked their best player, on the heels of a wild comeback win over the Colts, whether he’s playing the best ball of his seven-year career.
“It’s too early to say all that,” Myles Garrett says. “I just know I’m having fun doing it. It’s been a blast, win or lose, just playing with these guys. This defense is really rocking and rolling. It wasn’t our best showing today. But damn, we fought. Same with the offense and special teams. This team is truly special. I hope I continue to play some really good ball and continue to just turn it up and make that run toward the end of the season.
“Maybe we’ll be able to say that it’s my best ball. Until then, I’m just going to continue to have fun and lean on my guys.”
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The Browns have leaned on each other, for sure, in Watson’s absence.
After a wonky 28–3 loss to the Ravens on Oct. 1 (before which they didn’t know Watson would sit), the Browns got their bye to reset. They had veteran PJ Walker take rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson’s place at quarterback. They turned their Week 6 game into a 15-round fight and rode their defense to outpoint the unbeaten 49ers. And then there was Sunday, when that increasingly dominant defense hit its first real speed bump of the year.
From the start, and with their own backup quarterback, Gardner Minshew, at the helm, Shane Steichen’s Colts took the fight right to the Browns. Indianapolis threw a lot at the defense in a concerted effort to get the unit thinking and slow down the pace of Jim Schwartz’s breakneck scheme.
“They were getting Gardner involved in the run game a little bit with read action, especially in the red zone, varying the cadence in different ways,” Garrett says. “It was definitely them coming out very passionate in the run game and very confident in those two guys they’re blocking for. [Zack] Moss and [Jonathan] Taylor are legit. Those guys are ballers in their own right. They found a way to find holes and make plays.”
So the Browns—with Watson struggling in his return and eventually leaving the game, and their own defense having to figure out the Colts—had to be resourceful. That meant long field goals, flipping fields on special teams, creating short fields with defensive plays and, maybe, in the end, getting a little help from the guys in stripes, too (the illegal-contact call on the Colts that negated a would-be game-ending turnover was … pretty ticky-tack).
But more than anything, as they leaned on each other, the Browns simply let their best player lift them up.
And that guy, for the last seven years, has been Garrett. The difference this afternoon was in the uniqueness of an edge rusher putting an entire team on his back and carrying it over the finish line to victory, and, in Cleveland’s case, to a 4–2 mark.
Garrett’s first-half stat line looked, well, almost fake, or like something you might see from an Alabama edge rusher playing a directional school: The all-world rusher had two sacks, two forced fumbles, six tackles and an outrageous blocked field goal that should land on any highlight reel recapping the season. In the end, those plays, over the first 30 minutes, directly represented a 10-point swing in a 39–38 win that wound up decided by a single point.
Moreover, they showed, once again, the impact the 27-year-old has every time he steps between the white lines.
The first of the big plays came in the final two minutes of the first quarter, with Indianapolis up 14–7, after a Cleveland three-and-out (and near Watson pick) gave the Colts a chance to create some separation. On the play, a first-and-10 from the Colts’ 39-yard line, Garrett blew right past left tackle Bernhard Raimann and slapped the ball from Minshew’s hand, with Anthony Walker there to collect it and get the ball back to the Cleveland offense.
“I set it up,” Garrett says. “That was my second rush. I set it up with power beforehand to try and sit him down, to try and respect it. To his credit, he’s worked on his anchor a lot from last year, and he didn’t budge much. He moved enough for me to realize that he was going to be waiting on it the second time around. That second rush came and it was third down. It got off and I hit him with a jab step to try and shift his weight and get him off my track.
“As soon as he bit, I cut upfield and chopped down the hand and turned. I saw Gardner had the ball, so if I’m going to make the play, I got to go for it all. Went to swipe the ball out, and I got it.”
The Browns’ offense took advantage of the short field, running five times to cover the 36 yards remaining and tie the score at 14. And Garrett was just getting started.
The Colts’ possession to follow ended with Matt Gay lining up for a 60-yard field goal—giving Garrett the opportunity to try something he’s been working on, and asking for, for a while now. He’d shown his coaches that he could hurdle the line in practice. But doing it in a game is, of course, different. The Browns’ special teams coach, Raymond “Bubba” Ventrone, thought this week would be the right one because he saw how Indianapolis lined up to fire the ball off for a field goal.
“Bubba saw it and liked it,” Garrett says. “He asked if we could do it this week seeing that their line is a little on the lower side, get more leverage, keep us from rushing through them. Worked a little bit Friday. I guess he wanted to make sure I could still do it. Practice makes perfect.”
It worked Friday. It worked Sunday. Garrett hurdled the line, crediting his offseason basketball training (“everything has a purpose”) for the lift, and easily blocked Gay’s kick. Denzel Ward collected the ball and ran it back to the Colts’ 26-yard line, which is where Dustin Hopkins would kick a 44-yard field goal from four plays later.
And finally, there was perhaps the most impactful play Garrett made all day, with the Colts in second-and-16 from their own 6-yard line and 1:50 left in the half.
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Garrett came screaming off the left edge—blowing past tight end Drew Ogletree, then right tackle Blake Freeland—arriving at Minshew just as the quarterback was moving to throw and jarring the ball loose in the end zone. Tony Fields II covered it for the touchdown, putting the Browns back up 24–21 at the break.
“I got a great jump off the ball on that one,” Garrett says. “The tight end chipped me a bit, but it wasn’t enough to knock me off my track. The rookie, he didn’t kick far enough to settle on my speed. When he had his hands out, just swiped them by, ripped, and I saw Garner try to get away, stuck my hands out, went for it at that point when he was launching the ball and was able to get that one, too.”
Add it up and, again, you have the aforementioned 10-point swing, plus another 10 points the plays led to, which meant just about everything in a game that was nip-and-tuck to the end. Put differently, had it not been for Garrett’s out-of-this-world first half, the Browns probably would’ve been down multiple scores with a backup quarterback on the road. As it was, they were still positioned to win—which is just what they wound up doing.
Garrett, of course, has been really good for a while. With Sunday’s production he’s at 39.5 sacks over the 39 games he’s played in since the start of the 2021 season. And with the two sacks he just posted, he’s become the first player ever to post 81 sacks before turning 28 years old (Reggie White had 80, Derrick Thomas had 77, Bruce Smith had 76.5 and J.J. Watt had 76). And Garrett has done it with more than two months to spare (he will turn 28 on Dec. 29).
But if you’re paying close attention, this looked like Garrett reaching another level.
So while he is careful to talk about where he’s at just six games into this year—just as he is cautiously optimistic with the defense’s progress as a whole, saying only, “up until this point, yes, it is” when asked whether this is the best defense he’s played on—it’s not hard to see where this is going.
Just as the Colts saw Sunday, how good this Browns team is comes down to a whole lot more than which quarterback is playing.
