The Cleveland Browns started Jameis Winston after the injury to Deshaun Watson and found immediate offensive success they had not seen all season.
Defeating the Baltimore Ravens by a score of 29-24, Winston threw for 343 yards and three touchdowns for the Browns, including a deep bomb to Cedric Tillman with under a minute to play to put his team back on top.
Before Winston took the field for the Browns this week, the Browns ranked 30th in Expected Points Added (EPA) per game and dead last in success rate. In Week 8? They jumped to 11th in EPA per play and 13th in success rate.
Was Winston perfect? No, he was not.
However, even in drives that ended in punts, Winston was able to sustain a bit and give the defense a rest. The against the Washington Commanders and Dallas Cowboys slipped away largely because the defense did not have time to catch their breath due to constant failures on the offensive side of the ball.
This defense is good enough to carry the Browns through some offensive struggles, but not constant three-and-outs. Winston proved on Sunday that he can give the Browns positives.
He will give them negatives as well, losing one fumble in an avoidable area of he field and throwing the ball up for grabs on multiple occasions, but he also gives the Browns something they haven’t seen since Joe Flacco departed: explosive plays down the field.
So this begs the question: if the Browns had made the switch sooner, where would their season be? We are playing the hypothetical game at this point, but sitting at 2-6 on the season after the win against the Ravens what else do we have?
Four of the games the Browns lost were by one score, and in all of those games, they had plenty of offensive opportunities to win the game. What if Winston had been the backup against the Cincinnati Bengals last week instead of the emergency third quarterback?
Games like that against the New York Giants and Las Vegas Raiders, and perhaps even the Philadelphia Eagles have different outcomes. With the offensive output the Browns got yesterday, volatile yet explosive, combined with their defense when given the time to rest is a combination worth wondering about.
There is a real chance this team would be sitting at 5-3 on the season if Watson had been benched at halftime of the Giants game. The worst case scenario when playing out this hypothetical is sitting at 4-4 entering a pretty easy stretch of their schedule.
Instead, the Browns succumbed to the Sunk Cost Fallacy and decided to see it through with Watson despite finding his name at the bottom of a handful of metrics used to evaluate quarterback play.
What could have been?