After a "Thursday Night Football" victory over the division rival Pittsburgh Steelers, the Cleveland Browns are 3-1 and sitting, at least for now, in first place in the AFC North. It's an unfamiliar situation. The Browns haven't been 3-1 since 2021, and the last two years, they didn't get their third win of the season until November.
After the game, defensive end Jared Verse declared it a new day in Cleveland. "This ain't the old Browns," Verse said during his media availability. We're a lot more aggressive, a lot more, you know, getting after it.
This is something different here. We're going to make this whole city rock." The Browns' arrival at 3-1 comes as a significant surprise -- especially given the way the season started, with a pitiful performance in a blowout loss against the Jacksonville Jaguars, during which they looked like they were headed for another season where they posted one of the worst records in the NFL. "That was a complete, maybe disaster is a little bit strong, but that's a tough opening game in every phase, other than maybe kickoff return, maybe other than that," head coach Todd Monken said of the season opener.
"But the guys trusted the process. We got stung a little bit, and our guys responded to that. And, man, that locker room is fun, right there celebrating those guys.
Big, big, big divisional win." Monken did, however, caution against taking things too far after Cleveland's three straight victories. "It's still only three [wins]," Monken said. "And there's a lot of things we can continue to get better at, and we will, because our guys are humble and they're still hungry.
And it's really cool, because it means the next one continues to matter. That's all you want to be. You just want to be in a position where the games matter, right?
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