The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021: X

Raiders at Browns, Week 15: Surprise, Mullens-Carr was Not Fun For Anyone

To the most gullible of football optimists, it looked like it could be a sneaky fun game on paper. With the nastier bloodhounds in Cleveland’s Dog Pound dissatisfied and uninspired by Baker Mayfield’s streak of un-good play, and with the run-heavy approach with a backup QB proving effective against a blindsided Denver team having dazzled Browns Nation in Week 7, this double-header opener (we’ll return to the atrocious abomination that was the second game this night later in our list) figured to be a mildly amusing changeup contest. It wasn’t. It looked like what you think of when I say “Raiders-Browns.”

You remember Nick Mullens’ first start in the NFL. Everyone does. It was beautiful to behold, and impossible to forget. Mullens, an undrafted college peculiarity out of Southern Miss that the 49ers took a chance on in 2017, had about as good a debut as any quarterback in NFL history: 16 for 22, 262 yards, 3 touchdowns. Not only was it possibly the best quarterback debut ever, it was also essentially the ideal game for a quarterback through the eyes of a coach: he only threw 22 passes but completed 16 of them for over 10 yards a clip and tossed a trio of touchdowns in the process. Almost any coach would sign off on such numbers, but Kyle Shanahan especially would. Nick’s future looked, against all odds, bright. And his victim on this fortunate night? The Las Vegas Raiders, and one Derek Carr.

Fast forward 3 years. The scars of age have wounded Mr. Mullens. A once glimmering prospect who some anointed as the best undrafted quarterback since Kurt Warner (for those of us who don’t remember Austin Davis, anyway) has seen some additional action in San Francisco when Jimmy G was injured, but has failed to live up to the lofty billing he set for himself when he threw those 22 passes on his Hello World performance. He’s now on the Browns, pressed into duty following a catastrophic COVID-19 breakout that incapacitated depth chart superiors Case Keenum and Baker Mayfield. It fell to erstwhile Saint Nick to deliver Thursday Night NFL fun.

Did he disappoint? Well…sort of. He played a game that was in some ways very similar to the stunning debut he authored in his first year with Kyle Shanahan, who is himself a composer of gameplans very similar to Browns coach Kevin Stefanski: he eschewed liberal downfield daring, taking few chances, deciding not to force balls into tight coverage (even though, you know, this was the Raiders he was playing), remaining conservative, and generally playing within himself. Unfortunately, because this is Nick Mullens we’re talking about, “playing within oneself” makes for somniferous football. By the numbers, that means 20 of 30 for 147 yards, a tick under 5 yards per throw. But he didn’t take a sack, didn’t throw an interception, and executed the straightjacket gameplan devised for him admirably.

But if the play of Nick Mullens was somniferous, the Browns and Raiders’ running games were positively sedative. On Cleveland’s side, the bruiser stylings of Nick Chubb were the unabashed focus of the entire evening, with Chubb handling 23 of Cleveland’s 24 carries on the night for an okay-ish 3.9 yards per carry – 91 rushing yards altogether. What those numbers fail to reveal, though, is that 24 of those hard-begotten yards came on one run, meaning that his other 22 rushes totaled a Trent Richardsonian three point zero yards per rush. D’Ernest Johnson, meanwhile, who like Nick Mullens had shot to meteoric if powerfully temporary glory during the aforementioned game where Case Keenum started in place of Baker (22 for 146), received the lone other carry, and lost two yards. To round out this now overlong examination of a largely starless night for the Cleveland offense, let’s look at the people who caught passes for the Browns in this game: Johnson, Demetric Felton, Harrison Bryant, Rashard Higgins, David Njoku, Donovan Peoples-Jones, and Nick Chubb. Their running backs alone caught 8 passes…for 35 yards. Vegas’s Josh Jacobs didn’t do any better: 4 catches for THREE yards.

It’s not enough that just the shorthanded home team had to put forth a dizzyingly disenchanted effort on offense, though. Their guests from Las Vegas observed the ways of their hosts and decided, When In Rome.  The best receivers for LV this night were Zay Jones and Foster Moreau – you fill in the blanks from there. From a purely numerical perspective, Derek Carr looks like he clearly outplayed Nick Mullens, but this isn’t true. Whereas Mullens eschewed any turnover-courting risks, Carr threw up numerous attempted arm punts, the last of which, coming with only 2:52 left in the game, was intercepted by Greedy Williams and should have ended the game. On the drive right before this, the only genuinely intriguing substance of this game transpired, as  a wending and winding 16-play 80-yard drive culminated in a 4th-and-goal touchdown pass to Harrison Bryant, who, surprised as he was that they’d located the endzone successfully, promptly fell flat on his back despite no defenders being anywhere near him. Now the Browns had picked off Carr and could salt the game away. But Chubb chose the poorest possible time to run completely out of steam, gaining only 7 yards on 3 carries. Carr then completed 6 straight passes, spiked the ball, and allowed Daniel Carlson to kick a very challenging 48 yard field goal to win the game. Stefanski tried to ice the lanky Scandinavian, but DC sailed the first one beautifully for a warm up make and nailed number two as well. Could that have been the highlight of the evening? Well, maybe – it isn’t very often you see a kicker make the same field goal in two completely different ways before and after being iced. You look for little sparks of quasi-excitement like kicking nuance during games like this.

We would like to confer additional negative energy on this contest for another reason: this is the second straight wet thud of a game these two teams have played. Inspect your recollections of 2020, if you have any, and flip to the mental file containing memories of the game these two teams played in Cleveland just a year prior. That game finished 16-6. That’s barely 3 touchdowns worth of points, mind you, and 15 of those points came on field goals. The only touchdown in that game came from Hunter Renfrow on the second play of the fourth quarter after he performed one of his patented triple moves and barely – just barely – slid between Browns zone coverage to break the plane on what was effectively a concealed slant. That’s the extent of the excitement in that game, unless you want to include a functionally pointless goal line stand the Browns defense authored later in the fourth that simply kept the game from being 20-6. Thus, the judgment we render on the 2021 version of this once highly exciting matchup (they played a lights-out 45-42 overtime thriller in 2018, coincidentally Mayfield’s first start) is that of Tenth Worst Of 2021. Hopefully the next time these teams play it will be a touch more electrifying – if, perhaps, sleazier, with the next meeting likely being in Las Vegas and with a new, less virtuous Browns QB at the helm.

An abject Nick Mullens despairing at how this game ended; or, alternatively, an abject Nick Mullens emulating the position assumed by most of America throughout most of this game.