CLEVELAND — Be it through injuries or suspensions, the Cleveland Browns’ depth has been tested, early and often during the 2019 regular season, but rather than use the adversity as an excuse, the players buckled down and embraced the “1-0 this week” mantra from coach Freddie Kitchens.
Since falling to 2-6 with a loss to the Denver Broncos on November 3, the Browns rattled off three straight home wins and put themselves in position to reach the .500 mark with a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers at Heinz Field Sunday.
“Anytime you go through adversity, you either mature or you wilt,” Kitchens said in a conference call earlier this week. “I do not think our team is going to wilt. I think our team is going to continue to strive to get better each and every day, prepare the way they are supposed to prepare, and then, hopefully, go out and perform on Sundays with execution.
“Experience has a lot to do with the sort of thing that you are talking about. We have some guys and we were playing a lot of guys that had not played a whole lot of football in the National Football League. I think as you go along and those guys gain experience, of course, they gain a better feel for how the game is played.”
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All throughout the offseason program, training camp and the preseason, Kitchens stressed that he wanted his players focused on the task at hand, which meant concerning themselves with the meetings, applying corrections on the field during practice and taking the off-time to rejuvenate the body to be ready for the next day.
Since falling four games under .500, Kitchens has seen an uptick in the Browns’ focus, mainly because there is no margin for error remaining, as the next slip-up very well could dash the players’ postseason hopes.
“That is the way it is throughout the whole year. We kind of had to go into playoff mode a couple of weeks ago, and it is just one game at a time once you get to the playoffs,” Kitchens said. “That is the way it should be all year. I think these guys have just bought into that kind of mantra of 1-0 this week, and that is the only thing we care about.”
Although the Browns enter this Sunday’s game against the Steelers on a three-game winning streak, they understand that this team is still below the .500 mark and has plenty of work to do to make a legitimate run at a postseason berth.
“It was at the point of the season where that is really what we had to start doing and that we had to start really focusing on each week of we have to win this game and we have to be dialed in and ready to go and go 1-0 and you can’t think about two weeks from now, three weeks from now or four weeks from now,” center JC Tretter said.
“In the beginning of the season, if you were to say, ‘Let’s go 1-0 every week’ and you do that, then you will have a hell of a year. I think that is just where we found ourselves after kind of a rough, rocky start, and that is something we all kind of rallied behind now of just really focusing one week at a time, going out there and doing our jobs and making sure we put our best foot forward to win.”
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