MIAMI — When the 2019 NFL season started, Jarvis Landry hoped he'd be spending the final week of January in Miami.
The Cleveland Browns wide receiver, however, would have preferred to currently be preparing for a game rather than appearing on sports talk TV shows.
Nevertheless, Landry appeared on Fox Sports 1's UNDISPUTED on Wednesday afternoon as a part of the show's coverage of Super Bowl LIV. Unsurprisingly, the 5-time Pro Bowl selection spent a significant portion of his appearance discussing what went wrong for the Browns en route to their disappointing 6-10 record in 2019.
“Communication. It's the biggest thing” Landry answered when asked by Skip Bayless what the team's primary problem was. “When you don’t have everybody on the same page at all times, it can definitely screw a lot of things up. I was a part of it and you guys saw.”
That led Bayless to inquire about Freddie Kitchens, who was fired after his first season as the team's head coach. And while Landry wasn't willing to blame all of the Browns' issues on Kitchens, he did admit that the team lacked an identity cohesive identity throughout the year.
"I think it was the right thing to [hire Kitchens], [with the relationship he had formed with Baker [Mayfield]. But running a team is a lot more than being personable with one guy and coaching one guy,” Landry said. “Not that he was in over his head or anything like that, but we just couldn’t find a way to get on the same page and figure out what our identity was."
Landry later expounded: “We didn't really know what our true identity was. We would go into games, ‘this game we want to run the ball 50 times’ or ‘this game we want to throw the ball 50 times’ instead of just doing whatever it took to win and making in-game adjustments.
With 2019 in their rearview mirror, the Browns will move ahead with what will be Landry's fourth head coach since arriving in Cleveland in 2018. In hiring former Minnesota Vikings offensive coordinator Kevin Stefanski, the Browns are hoping to find the identity they lacked last season -- not that that will change Landry's approach to the game.
"I'm a competitor," Landry said. "Every time I take the field, I take the field to win, regardless of who's calling the plays, who's coaching, who's throwing the ball or who I'm next to. My approach will always stay the same."