Another NFL Week, Another Cleveland Browns Comeback Win

Down 14-0 in Tennessee, the Cleveland Browns did what they apparently do now. They came back and won again.

Rich opened Monday's show still riding the high of Friday's conversation with Todd Monken, a chat the crew tallied at five S-bombs and one F-bomb, the last of them followed by Monken's sheepish "Sorry I swore on your show." During that visit, Monken mentioned how great it was to be an NFL head coach with four chances so far to hand out game balls. Sunday delivered a fifth.

It did not look that way early. The Titans jumped out by two scores, and Tony Pollard found the end zone three times, enough to have the crew swapping fantasy lineup stories. Then Deshaun Watson went to work again.

"It's like Tebow time, Watson time, man," Rich said.

The numbers back it up. Rich laid out that Watson now has five game-winning drives in the fourth quarter or overtime this season, and he became the third quarterback in the Super Bowl era to lead a game-winning drive in each of his team's first five wins of a season, joining Matthew Stafford with the 2016 Lions and Troy Aikman with the 1990 Cowboys. Cleveland has already passed its win total from all of last year. On the list of game-winning drives by a Browns quarterback in a single season this century, Watson has climbed past Brian Hoyer's 2014 and Tim Couch's 2002 and into the company of Baker Mayfield's 2018.

What gets Rich most is how young the roster is. He rattled off KC Concepcion, Denzel Boston, Harold Fannin and Quinshon Judkins, who scored on Sunday. "They got good players who are now learning how to win behind a head coach who's just amazing," he said.

Monken, for his part, credited the traveling fans. Browns supporters were all over Nissan Stadium, and in his postgame remarks he said it felt like his side of the stands was all Browns fans. "That helped," Monken said, calling it "critically important" in getting his team through an opening stretch when it was not playing nearly as well.

Rich circled back to Monken's line from Friday, the idea that 20 years from now people might ask why they cannot do it more like the Browns. "The Browns are going to Browns is now a different phrase," Rich said, while acknowledging there is a long way to go between now and then.

At 5-2, Cleveland sits in first place, helped by the fact that it has already beaten Pittsburgh. That is exactly why next week matters. The Browns visit the Steelers, and Rich expects Pittsburgh to be waiting. "You know the Steelers want a piece of the Browns," he said. "How many times have the Browns walked into the stadium with a target on their back?"

After that comes a trip to New Orleans, then a home date with a 2-5 Houston team that puts Watson back across from Houston. Rich was careful to say he is talking about Watson strictly as a quarterback, not about what Watson put people through in Houston, and he acknowledged that every conversation like this one brings that history back up. Then comes the bye, with what Rich called "a ton of winnable games" in between.

The one that got away still nags. The crew pointed to the loss to the Jets, played in a rainstorm with high winds, as the kind of result Cleveland will look back on and kick itself over. For now, though, the Browns are 5-2 with five comeback wins, and Rich is all in on the man running the show. "Monken is just, I love the guy," he said.