BEREA, Ohio — Cleveland Browns coach Freddie Kitchens wants to lead players who care more about winning than they do individual statistics and accomplishments, and he sees that kind of mindset in the offensive backfield.
In his return from an eight-game suspension, running back Kareem Hunt served as a lead blocker for several of Nick Chubb’s runs while occasionally carrying the ball or catching passes out of the backfield on the way to a 19-16 victory over the Buffalo Bills at FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland last Sunday.
“I think it’s great,” Kitchens said of Hunt being a lead blocker for Chubb. “I think Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt are very unselfish. All they want to do is win football games, and I like guys like that.”
With Hunt on the field for the first time during the 2019 regular season after serving a suspension for off-the-field incidents including assaulting a woman at a Cleveland hotel/apartment complex, the Browns averaged 5.7 yards per carry, gaining 147 yards on 26 rushes on the way to Cleveland’s first win in more than a month.
With Hunt helping lead the way and distract the defense coupled with hard running from Chubb, the Browns’ lead back gained 116 yards.
“Anytime you can get guys that can do things with the ball in their hands, and they also can play off other people, that definitely impacts decisions, alignments, assignments,” Kitchens said. “The way you get the ball to those guys changes. When you have more than a couple options from that position in particular, it’s very good.”
Hunt got only four carries, but turned them into 30 yards and a game-high 7.5 yards-per-rush average. Additionally, Hunt caught seven of the nine passes quarterback Baker Mayfield threw his way and turned those receptions into 44 yards.
“I played him about right,” Kitchens said of Hunt. “The sequence of plays got him a couple times. I told him he needs to build endurance up. I’ve been telling him that for two weeks, so I guess I had to make a believer out of him. He wasn’t complaining though.
“I think he’s (shaken off the rust) since he’s been back with us. He got a couple good weeks of practice in, and you could see his movements, fluidness kind of start to come back during the course of the weeks. I didn’t have any question that he was going to perform well.”
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Although the Browns’ plans to use Hunt and Chubb against the Pittsburgh Steelers on “Thursday Night Football” will remain a closely-guarded secret until game day, Kitchens knows that when they are on the field together, defenses have to be on alert.
“It depends on really what kind of defense they are,” Kitchens said. “Some of them play zone. Some of them play man, so you always have to decide in man who you’re going to cover. In a zone, you just do the things you do normally.
“You have to account for them.”