The Cleveland Browns are headed to the playoffs. They officially clinched with a win last Thursday night, then on Sunday became locked into the AFC’s top wild-card spot after the Ravens routed the Miami Dolphins in Baltimore.
Because I expected the Ravens to win that game, and because it was a weekend off for the Browns, I wasn’t thinking much about the playoffs Sunday afternoon as I ran a few errands and pretended to be interested in helping my wife take down the Christmas decorations.
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Then I saw the photo. The one I’ve been chuckling about since.
My colleague in Baltimore, Jeff Zrebiec, was making his walk toward M&T Bank Stadium when he saw this man wearing a Joe Flacco Browns jersey and took the picture. Things get done fast these days, but Flacco’s children didn’t even have that replica jersey until last Thursday’s game.
Outside M&T Bank Stadium: pic.twitter.com/Rf9vPVpYUz
— Jeff Zrebiec (@jeffzrebiec) December 31, 2023
I don’t know the man in the picture, and I don’t know his story — or the story of how he secured the jersey and why he chose to wear it to the Ravens-Dolphins game. None of us know how the fascinating and wildly improbable story of Flacco elevating the Browns and pushing them to the playoffs is going to end, but he’s been good enough to make all of us believe it won’t necessarily end right away once the postseason begins.
You should know by now where I’m going with this, but please keep reading. It has to happen. Divisional round, M&T Bank Stadium. The top-seeded 13-3 Ravens, probably the only team hotter than the Browns, hosting Cleveland and Joseph Vincent Flacco.
It just has to. And that guy in the picture has to wear his jersey.
The Browns are back to practice on Wednesday. Because their postseason spot is clinched, this final regular-season matchup against a Cincinnati Bengals team eliminated from playoff contention is a bonus week.
This is all really happening. Flacco Fever in Cleveland. A guy in Baltimore, where Flacco played his first 11 seasons, wearing a Flacco Browns jersey. The 11-5 Browns, winners of four straight, earning the right to rest some key players and roll out some inexperienced young players in a bonus week ahead of what will be just the fourth playoff game of the Browns’ new era.
We don’t know their exact wild-card round opponent, but we know it will be the AFC South winner. And we don’t know for sure that the winner of the AFC’s No. 4-No. 5 game — Jacksonville, Indianapolis or Houston versus Cleveland — will draw the Ravens in the divisional round. Per the NFL’s playoff rules, the lowest-seeded remaining team will visit the No. 1 seed. There’s at least a fairly good chance the Browns could earn a return trip to Baltimore, though. If the AFC’s No. 2 and No. 3 teams win at home on wild-card weekend, the winner between the Browns and the AFC South champion will play the Ravens in the divisional round.
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Nothing about any of this — this Browns season or this Flacco story — has been standard, so we’re not penciling in any results or taking anything for granted. But the Browns have already defeated all three of their potential wild-card opponents, and nothing is getting jinxed by some outside discussion of what might happen on the weekend of Jan. 20. We all want the Flacco Bowl, and the Browns look capable of getting there with the 16-year veteran under center.
The Browns followed the lead of their coach, Kevin Stefanski, in embracing the one-game-at-a-time approach that’s carried them to this position. Only once this season did they lose two straight games. They haven’t lost since Flacco’s first start this season against the Los Angeles Rams on Dec. 3. For just the fourth time in the team’s new era, the Browns are riding a four-game win streak. Flacco is throwing rockets all over stadiums, and with a newly energized offense to pair with what’s been an elite defense since Week 1, Cleveland is going to be a tough out.
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Per BetMGM, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson is the favorite to be named NFL MVP. Stefanski is the favorite to be Coach of the Year. Browns defensive end Myles Garrett is the favorite to win Defensive Player of the Year. Jackson replaced Flacco as Baltimore’s quarterback in 2018, and the Ravens traded Flacco to Denver a couple of months after that season. This one would have plenty of juice even if it wasn’t the franchise that used to be the Cleveland Browns matched up against the current Cleveland Browns in the postseason for the first time. And even if it wasn’t Flacco going back to play the team he quarterbacked in 15 postseason games, including an MVP performance in Super Bowl XLVII.
The 2023 Browns announced themselves as true AFC contenders in mid-November when they won in Baltimore. Greg Newsome II returned an interception of Jackson for a touchdown, and Deshaun Watson led Cleveland back from multiple double-digit deficits in that game. The Ravens have not lost since. The Browns found out the day after that game they’d lost Watson for the rest of the season, and in the days that followed they set up a workout with Flacco with the thinking that he would begin his 16th season as the Browns’ latest emergency quarterback option.
Flacco has now started five games for Cleveland. He’s thrown for at least 300 yards in each of the last four, all wins, and has become the first player in NFL history to have at least 250 passing yards and two touchdown passes in each of his first five games with a new team. He’s fresh, and his arm is still ridiculously strong. The New York Jets hadn’t allowed a 300-yard passer all season, but Flacco threw for 296 yards in the first half.
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The Jets knew Flacco well; they had him on their roster for each of the three previous seasons. He’s a new player now, thriving in a place where he didn’t know the offensive terminology or more than a couple of his teammates just six weeks ago. Flacco’s 2020 completion percentage was 55.2, the lowest of his career. It was 57.6 last year, when the Jets’ wild Week 2 rally in Cleveland was the only one of Flacco’s four starts that the Jets won. Since leaving the Ravens, he’d gone 3-14 as a starter over four seasons with two teams. He threw 14 total touchdown passes in 12 games in three seasons with the Jets.
He’s thrown 13 touchdown passes in five games with the Browns.
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Since Flacco officially joined Cleveland’s practice squad on Nov. 19, he’s talked a lot about appreciating an opportunity he wasn’t sure would come. He’s repeatedly said that being back in a locker room and back in a playoff race had him feeling like a kid again. He’s acknowledged that it’s “surreal” to have become a fan favorite in Cleveland and to see his kids opening new Browns gear on Christmas, but he’s also talked about entering a locker room that was focused on getting to a place Flacco is familiar with. The playoffs.
He’s talked a lot, too, about December football and the persistence it takes to win close games. And how that turns into January football. He hasn’t mentioned that he turns 39 following wild-card weekend — maybe because he hasn’t had time to develop a birthday wishlist — but he’s said he immediately saw the Browns as a team with enough pieces to get to the postseason if he could just do his part.
“You know, you look around and just the way Kevin’s scheduling everything out, you can tell that guys are focused on just today,” Flacco said. “I think that’s what you do. Obviously, you know what’s ahead and we know what’s kind of promised to us and then we know what’s out there. Obviously, we’re not blind to all that, but it is about staying in the moment week to week. And you can tell when you walk around a locker room that guys have a singular focus. If it wasn’t the case, then we would take care of it. And I think there are ways you can go about that, but you can tell guys are focused in on what we’re doing this week.”
Here they are, about to start a bonus week. Here are the Browns, with a chance to ride this momentum and their big-armed quarterback into the playoffs. It seems more than fair and realistic to imagine where they might go.
Maybe even Baltimore in two (or three) weeks.
(Photo: Scott Galvin / USA Today)
