Prime Time Brownies

Question: Are the Browns ready for prime time?

Answers: We’ll find out soon enough, and they had better be.

That’s because the National Football League national television spotlight will shine blazingly on them at least four times this season. And if they pass a severe test early in the campaign, that number conceivably could grow.

The gents and computers who carved out the 2019 season schedule have glommed onto the suddenly very attractive Cleveland Browns and featured them on television nationally three of the first five weeks.

The Browns, who enter this season with hopes of success higher than at any time since the mid-1990s, haven’t played a Monday night game since 2015 or a Sunday night game since way back in 2008. They frankly were not worthy.

The franchise that made the basement of its division a virtual permanent home until last season, the franchise professional football fans have made the butt of jokes for the last two decades has become an overnight sensation.

The reward for the heretofore sad sacks of the NFL? A 16-game schedule unlike any other since the big return in 1999, one that deals a series of severe blows to the circadian rhythms of the players.

Most fans busied themselves with the enjoyment of predicting how the Browns will do when the schedule was unveiled a few days ago. They looked for potential dangerous stretches, soft spots, trap games. You know, the usual.

Overlooked was how this unusual schedule would affect established routines for players and coaches throughout the season.

Most, if not all, players get their bodies ready physically, emotionally and mentally to play games at 1 o’clock local time on most Sundays with perhaps an occasional Thursday night, Sunday night or Monday night game.

Not the Browns this season. Not by a long shot. Their schedule is littered with time inconsistencies the entire season.

Half their games start at 1 local time on a Sunday, but the only time they play consecutive Sunday games at that time is the final two games of the season and even that might get flexed into a later game depending on the importance of the games.

Back-to-back nationally beamed games in weeks two and three, plus a third just two weeks later on the road has to make it difficult on not just the players, but the coaching staff from a preparatory standpoint.

Two of those national games are Monday night affairs on the road (New York and San Francisco after a road game the prior week). It’s hard enough to prepare for games when there is rhythm to a season and the bodies are ready to play those 1 p.m. games, let alone the unevenness of the season.

The Browns get a break for the fourth national TV game, a Thursday-night date at home with Pittsburgh in mid-October. It’s also the middle game of a three-game home stand in the second half of the season.

How the Browns finish this season will depend largely on how well they do in the first eight games, easily the tougher half of the season. They face only one team that made the playoffs (Baltimore) in the second half, five of which are at home.

The harshest stretch by far in the schedule, a four road-game minefield (at Baltimore, San Francisco, New England and Denver) in six weeks (including a bye in week seven), most likely will be a determining factor where the club resides coming down the stretch.

If the Browns emerge with no worse than a 5-3 or 4-4 record, they’ve got a great shot at winning the AFC North. (That feels so strange typing.)

Winning on the road the last several seasons was merely a dream. Last season, though, the Browns were much more competitive, winning twice and having a third unfairly snatched by a terrible call late in the Oakland loss.

The Browns catch another break in the second half of the season, playing five of their remaining eight games against AFC North opponents after running back Kareem Hunt returns to the lineup after serving an eight-game suspension.

Not to be overlooked is the season opener at home against Tennessee, a game that involves one of the last vestiges of disappointments and embarrassments this franchise has endured the last 20 seasons. There is something about season- and home-opening games that seems to elude the Browns’ grasp at emerging victorious.

During that span they are 1-18-1 (1-14-1- at home) in season-opening games, the tie a 21-21 overtime affair last season at home against Pittsburgh, which snapped a 13-game losing skid in season lid lifters. The winless streak stands at 14.

The only victory in that span was a 20-3 beat down of Baltimore in 2004, a season the club finished 4-12. Fourteen of those season-opening 18 losses have been at home.

The last time the Browns and Titans teams met was week seven of the infamous winless season in 2017, the Titans winning, 12-9, in overtime in Cleveland in a touchdown-less game.

A reason to be excited about this season’s opening game? That Browns team was far inferior to this season’s edition.