CLEVELAND — Remember those innocent days in training camp when the rookie head coach swore he didn’t understand the concept of a bull’s-eye?
“We will be ready to play,” Freddie Kitchens said then. “I do not know what a ‘bull’s-eye’ is. I do not know what that is. Does anybody know? Does anybody know what a bull’s-eye is?”
Kitchens said he figured every team the Browns played would already bring their best regardless of whether his players provided bulletin board material or showed up on magazine covers or whatever.
In theory, that’s true. In practice, the home team wasn’t ready to stand up to the Titans who claimed extra motivation from hearing so much about the Browns as Super Bowl contenders over the winter and through training camp.
“They were who we thought they were,” Tennessee tight end Delanie Walker said in his best Dennis Green impression. “Y'all can crown 'em if you want. Crown 'em. Still got to play football."
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Before you say it’s nonsensical that athletes require artificial stimulation to inspire them, keep in mind your quarterback has put it to good use in convincing himself his world is full of doubters. It’s played at least a small part in Baker Mayfield rising to No. 1 pick in the draft status.
The target takes many shapes and comes in all sizes.
It’s Titans head coach Mike Vrabel convincing his team nobody was giving it a chance against the Browns.
It’s Delanie Walker calling the Browns “front-runners” even though little of the puffery around them came from the players themselves and certainly not from Kitchens, whose “Whoopty-hell” was a direct response to being told his team suddenly has loads of talent.
It’s Rex Ryan calling Mayfield “overrated as hell” (and not stopping to consider he aggrandized himself and the Jets as Super Bowl contenders almost every season he coached there.)
Note: If a Ryan brother calls you overrated, it’s the equivalent of Charlie Sheen calling you a little loony. You wait for the irony to sink in on your accuser. It won’t, but it still deserves a pregnant pause.
“It is whatever," Mayfield said Wednesday. "In the wise words of Freddie Kitchens, 'If you do not wear orange and brown, you do not matter,' and Rex Ryan does not have any colors right now for a reason, so it is OK."
Kitchens gave Ryan’s take that Mayfield is a “one-read quarterback” what it probably deserved.
‘Asinine,” he called it.
Here’s the thing. If you say only things cloaked in brown and orange matter, then you don’t respond to Ryan at all or play the “does not have any colors” card. The fact Kitchens and Mayfield did is more evidence they haven’t shot out the noise.
“I think it’s something that you really need to be conscious of,” Mayfield told reporters. “Because you’re surrounded in an environment where you hear a lot of things. Stuff pops up on your phone, stuff’s on the TV.
“You have to make a conscious decision to protect your locker room, take care of your guys and block out the negative stuff. And when they’re patting you on the back, to me, that’s even worse.”
In the end you most often win games because you’re better than the Jets and lose them because you are not as good as the Rams. But wearing a bull’s-eye is a factor that can drain energy and cause major stumbles out of missteps.
The archery on display isn’t all from sniper range, either.
Kitchens spent this week here addressing his fourth-and-nine draw call and his goal-line attack that didn’t include Nick Chubb against the Rams. Those questions would come at any coach, let alone a rookie. What’s different with Kitchens as the first-year coach of a talented team expected to contend is the conversation quickly expands to whether he should give up play calling to coordinator Todd Monken.
(The one thing we suspect he can do well is call plays. Let’s at least wait until he loses his first division game because of it before we urge him to give up the part of the job that got him hired in the first place.)
The Browns, even at 1-2, are in a two-team race with Baltimore for the AFC North. The Bengals are who we thought they were. We don’t know what the Steelers are without Ben Roethlisberger, but we strongly suspect they’re not contenders.
The Ravens? Good but not great. (And probably in their minds that’s disrespectful to say.)
“The media (has been) talking about OBJ and that tandem and Baker Mayfield, the next savior," Ravens safety Earl Thomas said this week, via ESPN. "Then, to add on to that, Coach (Harbaugh) talked about it a couple of times in meetings. So guys kind of got tired about it.”
And so here we go again. The Ravens are defending AFC North champs embracing whatever extra motivation they can find.
Meanwhile, the Browns are learning what being a circled team, instead of the circler, is all about.
