Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanksi is trying to navigate the club back to the playoffs with a revolving door at the quarterback position.
A playoff berth seemed as close to a certainty after the Browns posted consecutive wins against the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers left Cleveland sitting pretty at 7-3 has become, while not hopeless, a bit less certain after consecutive losses to the Denver Broncos and Los Angeles Rams.
Entering this weekend’s slate of games the Browns are part of a jumble of nine AFC teams with between five and seven wins in the hunt for a Wild Card spot.
The Browns are back home on Sunday to face the Jacksonville Jaguars and Stefanski is once again faced with what to do at quarterback.
He could turn back to Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who cleared the league-mandated concussion protocol on Friday or stick with Joe Flacco, who last week became the club’s fourth starting quarterback of the season.
While that feels like the safe choice to keep Cleveland’s playoff hopes alive, the reality is that the Browns are going to need Flacco to play better starting on Sunday against the Jaguars than he did last week against the Rams.
Flacco only completed 52.3 percent of his passes, averaged just 5.8 yards per attempt, and threw a game-deciding interception when he tried to flex his big arm with the Browns down by just one point with 6:51 left in the game.
Those numbers are not that dissimilar from what Thompson-Robinson, who showed some incremental improvement in his start against the Broncos, has put up this season, with the biggest difference being that DTR is only averaging 3.9 yards per attempt.
This is not to imply that Flacco was bad – outside of the interception he kept things tidy on offense – and it is important to remember that it was his first start after spending the first three months of the season sitting at home.
