BEREA, Ohio (92.3 The Fan) – Greedy Williams was designated to return from injured reserve Wednesday and the Browns’ cornerback is hopeful he’ll be able to play Sunday.
“Yes, it’s highly a chance,” Williams said. “It just depends on how I feel today at practice. I’m going to give it a go. If it feels great, I’m going.”
Head coach Kevin Stefanski was more measured when asking about Williams before practice.
“This is kind of the first step in getting him out there to practice,” Stefanski said.
“He is doing great. He has been doing a great job off to the side in his rehab.
Get him into practice, get him some plays here and see how he responds.”
Williams was placed on injured reserve with a hamstring injury on September 9 and missed the first four games of the season.
“It’s kinda hard when you’re just sitting down and you’re just thinking, ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’ I just carried the gratitude with it and realized it is what it is,” Williams said. “The medical staff, they’re great, so they uplift me as well.”
The injury was just the latest that the 2019 second-round pick has had to recover from.
Williams missed four games as a rookie with a hamstring injury and sat out the 2020 season after suffering a nerve injury in his shoulder during training camp. Last season Williams missed a game in mid-November due to another shoulder injury.
“I wouldn’t call it a jinx,” Williams said. “I just say it’s another chapter in the book, man, just to come back and be better and prove again what I can do.”
Seeing red – The Browns red zone offense has come under fire after it flamed out spectacularly in Atlanta Sunday.
“It is just frustrating,” quarterback Jacoby Brissett said. “You just want to score touchdowns. We always say we don’t care who scores for us. We just want to put the ball in the end zone. We just have to be better in those situations.”
Cleveland ran 11 plays from inside their opponents 12 and scored just three points, reaching the 2-yard line twice Sunday afternoon.
“When we went back and looked, our attention to detail and focus in the red zone, that was very uncharacteristic of us,” Brissett said. “Just honing back in and focusing on our details with each play, and we will get the results that we want.”
The failure inside the 20 was a rare occurrence for the Browns this season. They’ve made 16 trips and scored 15 times – nine of those were touchdowns.
“I think once we get down there, our mindset has to change,” running back Nick Chubb said. “We have to get the ball in the end zone. We have to find a way. We didn’t execute very well, as we have been this season. It’s something we worked on in the offseason, but last Sunday we weren’t able to quite get it together.
We have to be better down there.”
Stefanski has come under fire for his decision to go for it on fourth down, which failed and saw Brissett throw it out of the back of the end zone after extending the play to his right, on their opening drive.
“It was just a bad job by myself,” Brissett said.
The one conversation Brissett wants nothing to do with when it comes to the red zone offense is play selection – run vs. pass.
“We could play that game all day of which one is better,” Brissett said. “I thought we had good plays down there. It is just about our execution and focusing in on the details.”
Killer mentality – The Browns defense continues to melt down in the fourth quarter.
They surrendered another 13 points in the loss to the Falcons.
“I can't really put my finger on it,” safety John Johnson III said. “You're going to get the team's best effort in the fourth quarter and we've got to match that intensity so I think we've just got to put an emphasis on it.”
So far this season they’ve surrendered 50 points in four games in the final 15 minutes.
“Yeah we were pretty bad in fourth quarter right now,” safety Grant Delpit said. “That's not what great teams do.”
So what gives?
“Just staying locked in for 60 minutes and having that killer mentality,” Delpit said. “We have a standard to uphold to be a top-half, No. 1 defense. We've got to stick together and play four quarters.”
Familiar faces – The Browns signed tight end Pharaoh Brown to the active 53 Wednesday.
Brown was with Cleveland in 2018 as a member of the practice squad and started six of nine games he appeared in 2019 with the team. He caught seven passes for 72 yards in three games with the Texans this season.
Safety Richard LeCounte, the first player drafted by Andrew Berry to be waived by the EVP/GM, was also signed to the practice squad Wednesday after clearing waivers.
Blown opportunity – The Browns easily could be 4-0 or at worst 3-1 but they aren’t spending much time dwelling on what could or should be.
“It is what it is at this point,” Chubb said. “We lost. We’re a 2-2 team. We can’t do anything about it. We have to keep working moving forward.”
Quote of the day – “I think they’re No. 1 in passing, so if there’s a game that you’ve got to get up for and be locked in for it’s this one and that’s the emphasis for our room especially. We’ve had some flashes of good things, but I think each and every play we’ve got to be locked in or we are going to get torched because they’ve been doing it to anybody dating back to last year too.
If there’s a game that we need our best effort from the secondary, it’s this one.” Johnson on facing Justin Herbert and the Chargers.
Injury report – DNP: LG Joel Bitonio (biceps/rest), TE Harrison Bryant (illness), DE Jadeveon Clowney (ankle), WR Amari Cooper (rest), TE David Njoku (knee/rest); LIMITED: DT Taven Bryan (hamstring), DE Myles Garrett (shoulder, biceps), DT Jordan Elliott (knee), LB Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah (groin), OT Joe Haeg (concussion); FULL: DE Isaiah Thomas (hand)
Up next – Practice Thursday.