Week 13: Cleveland at Arizona

How funny is it that the Browns are 7-4? That’s a rhetorical question: it’s quite funny, if not exactly funny ha-ha. With five eminently winnable games left on their schedule – believe it or not, this is actually the toughest of the team’s last five games – Cleveland could conceivably finish at 12-4. Really. This despite…actually, this calls for a new paragraph.

This despite a defense that is the NFL’s worst by a wide margin: their 397.9 yards per game is 21.4 yards more than the 31st-ranked Bills and 170.7 more than the NFL-best Steelers, who are (totally) coincidentally their competition for the AFC Central title. This despite starting a defense made up entirely of anonymous, semi-competent dudes who all sound like soap opera actors (“With Daven Holley as ‘Admiral Koonce’ and Leigh Bodden as ‘Count Von Schimmelpennick’”). This despite…look, despite everything rational. Despite whatever football analysis our brain can muster, despite every statistical metric available. The Browns success – and it must be called that, at this point – flies in the face of all that.

And yet it’s not totally irrational. At some point, even inexplicable success is somewhat comprehensible. The Browns are very confident on offense, where stopgap QB Derek Anderson has officially crossed the waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop threshold to emerge in our minds, at least and at last, as a serious quarterback. It helps that he’s got a bunch of really good receivers running routes for him – outside of Antonio Gates, no NFL tight end is having a better season than Kellen Winslow, and WR Braylon Edwards has become a first-tier star as well – but Anderson has also played impressively mistake-free football. Even RB Jamal Lewis, whom we’ve compared to more types of bad automobiles (with dragging bumpers, always) this season than we can count, is starting to come around.

Look, these Browns are not good. We know that, you know that, and even our friends who are Browns fans will admit it if pressed slightly. And yet, they’re 7-4, which we know we already wrote, but it kind of amazes us every time we type it, so we did it again. We know the stats cited above are ugly, but how can a playoff team be bad?

Well, we’ll tell you in January. But right now let’s talk about the Cardinals, who are by almost every meaningful measure a better team than the Browns, and yet will fall out of playoff contention if they lose this game. Being better than Cleveland doesn’t mean Arizona is good, exactly. They’re maddeningly inconsistent, have a weird knack for losing games in which they’ve outplayed the other team most of the way (witness Week 3 at Baltimore or last week’s wild, wildly disappointing loss to San Francisco), and are around the middle of the pack in both offensive and defensive stats.

Yet even with a much-diminished Edgerrin James in the backfield and a weird quarterback platoon in which ultra-devout quasi-washout Kurt Warner randomly gives way to journeyman Tim Rattay, who periodically comes in to throw touchdowns – seriously: Rattay’s last three passing attempts, over three games, have gone for scores and total just five yards – the Cardinals have a pretty explosive offense. They’ve topped 30 points in each of their last three games, and have what is probably the NFL’s best pair of receivers in Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald.

The Cardinals aren’t outstanding against either the run or the pass, but they have an excellent defensive line and a solid secondary (although two starters, including Pro Bowl S Adrian Wilson, went on IR this week), and plenty of talent at each position. There’s nothing wrong, exactly, with this roster – it’s easily the team’s best since…uh, they were in St. Louis? – and Coach Ken Whisenhunt has the team playing passionate, if hardly mistake-free, football. As we said: probably better than the Browns.

And yet, despite the fact that there’s the very real possibility that the Cardinals offense could hang 50-plus points on Cleveland’s General Hospital defense, it’s hard to pick a team that has managed to lose games it should’ve won over one that has, inexplicably, won games it had no right even being in. The Cardinals home field advantage (again, seriously: people go to Cardinals games, now) and significant edge in talent mean they should win, here. But we believe in the Browns, even if we don’t, you know, really believe in them at all. If the most inexplicable 7-4 record in recent memory isn’t reason for a bit of faith, we don’t know what is.

Browns by 3