Rest of Season Forecast 2019

There's no way to get around the fact that the Cleveland Browns' start to the 2019 season has underperformed expectations. Subjectively speaking, most fans probably expected between a 4-2 or 3-3 start to the season, but, in reality, the Browns sit at 2-4 as they enter their week seven bye.

But where does the Browns' season end up given the baseline of actual performance that they've presented us with so far?

I posed this question on Twitter earlier this week and the results show that my following (likely heavily populated by optimistic Browns fans) believes that Cleveland will take 6-8 wins from their final 10 games. This result would have the Browns finish with between 8 and 10 wins on the year, and probably in the midst of the AFC playoff hunt.

And that would be a storybook way to conclude the season, wouldn't it? The 2-4 Browns, battered and dejected after coughing up a week six loss to Seattle, rally together during the bye, attack the Death Star that is the New England Patriots and go on to wrap the season up with crisp play in the second half of the year to keep themselves within striking distance of a playoff berth.

I'm not here to tell you that it can't happen, just that the numbers say it's unlikely.

To evaluate that statement, let's first look first at the Browns and their future opponents from an advanced stats point of view, using Expected Points Added (EPA) per play to get a sense for how Cleveland stacks up to their upcoming opponents through six weeks of play.

Offensive and Defensive EPA of the Browns and their Upcoming Opponents:

Comparing offenses to offenses, the Browns have generated expected points at one of the lowest rates in the league, rivaling (tanking) Miami and (defacto tanking) Cincinnati for futility by this metric. One might feel inclined to argue that the offense hasn't taken off because of the quality of defensive competition they have faced during the early gauntlet set forth in the Browns' 2019 schedule; but the problem there is that it doesn't get any easier for the next few weeks. As noted in the charts above, New England, Buffalo, Denver and Pittsburgh all field defenses that will challenge the Browns' ability to get their offense going in the next four weeks. Luckily for the Browns, they have the talent on offense to do better and are duly blessed with a bye week to shake out the cobwebs and get things on track. Cleveland's most realistic chance of rescuing the 2019 season from bitter failure rests on this offensive group's being able to maximize their opportunity to get things right ahead of a tough stretch of defensive matchups.

Comparing defenses, the Browns' unit has faded a bit of late and ranks below-average relative to the rest of the league by EPA allowed per play. On the positive side, they do figure to get a bit of a break from facing the very efficient offenses that the Browns have grappled with recently in Baltimore, San Francisco and Seattle, as their next few opponents aren't exactly lighting things up offensively. This Browns defense is talented and they have already shown that they can bottle up statistically-superior offenses (ex: at Baltimore, Wk4). But they'll need to prove further that back-to-back subpar outings against the 49ers and Seahawks won't define them as a group moving forward. Cleveland will most likely get starting CB's Denzel Ward and Greedy Williams back after the bye week, which should help to solidify the pass defense (Rank: 17th in Pass EPA allowed) and, by extension, the pass rush. But improving a leaky run defense (Rank: 26th in Rush EPA allowed) has to be a focus for the Browns' coaching staff coming out of the week seven bye, as the team has proven to be quite exploitable on the ground through six games.

Projecting the Season's 2nd Half:

As you may have gathered, according to brownalytics' statistical model, it's not shaping up to be a rosy conclusion to the season.

Based on the Browns' and their upcoming opponents' statistical profiles through week six having been played-out over 1,000 simulations of the rest of the season, the Browns are projected to win only four more games in 2019. If the season does end up this way, Cleveland would finish at 6-10, good for third in their division, in a year where preseason expectations had billed anything less than a divisional round playoff appearance as a disappointment.

Game-by-game projections are included below and, as you'll readily see, the model currently favors the Browns to win against only Miami and against Cincinnati (twice), with Cleveland picking up a 4th win somewhere between close matchups against Denver, Arizona and Pittsburgh.

These estimated results are discouraging, to be sure. But, just for a moment, take a step back and consider the following question: why should this projection be all sunshine and rainbows?

The Browns are a bad offensive team at the moment, ranking bottom half or bottom quarter in the league by nearly all significant statistical categories. On defense, the strength of this team so far, opposing offenses have been able to scheme away from the Browns' fearsome pass rush by running right at it (with success) and by protecting their QBs with quick throws. Cleveland's starting corners are young and haven't played a game in over a month due to injury, while players who were prominent performers in 2018 have been mysteriously held out of games or not used. Baker Mayfield's performance has regressed by almost any objective measure of QB performance and, when the Browns do manage to put a bit of momentum together, out come the yellow flags to short-circuit everything.

In short, these projections are discouraging because they follow along with the Browns' level of performance so far this season, which has been discouraging. Of course, using past statistics as an indicator of future performance will never be perfect and, as touched on above, the Browns do have the talent to turn their season around. But the point here is that it shouldn't be seen as a foregone conclusion that the team will just steamroll through the "easy" part of their schedule. The Browns have a lot of work to do both during and after their bye week in order to prove that they aren't the below-average team that their stats say they are.

Implications of the Projection:

So how does the AFC North race shake out in our simulations? Baltimore finishes atop the division with between 9 and 10 wins and is the lone playoff qualifier, finishing 2nd in the AFC (by cumulative win probability, not factoring in any complicated tiebreakers).

In this universe, Cleveland would head into a long and lonely offseason owning the 7th pick in the draft. Again, this estimate is derived only from Cleveland's cumulative win probability and doesn't account for any of the complex tiebreakers that truly determine draft order.

Extrapolating even further out, Benjamin Robinson's (@benjrobinson) "Grinding the Mocks" project has tracked picks in 300+ mock drafts to date and can give us a good, albeit early, idea of trends in draft prognostications for teams and players. For the Browns, this view is as would be expected given the public fervor around Cleveland's needing to upgrade the O-Line. Currently 53% of mocks have John Dorsey selecting an Offensive Tackle in the First Round next April, while 13% of mocks have the team selecting a Safety.

In terms of the OT's and Safeties that figure to be available at pick seven, Grinding the Mocks projects that the Browns would be deciding between Iowa's Tristan Wirfs at OT or LSU's Grant Delpit at Safety, based on the snapshot presented below. Of course, these are very early estimates of draft position and they will very likely shift between now and April.

Sources:

1. Horowitz, Maksim, Ventura, Sam & Yurko, Ron (2016). NFLScrapr; Rstats package for accessing NFL play-by-play data, providing expected points and win probability estimate. Retrieved 10/17/2019.

2. Pro Football Reference. Retrieved from https://www.pro-football-reference.com; 10/17/2019

3. Grinding the Mocks. Retrieved from https://grindingthemocks.shinyapps.io/Dashboard/; 10/17/2019