There are only so many ways to spin how successful Kevin Stefanski has been in his stint with the Cleveland Browns so far. With that said, a Reddit user found a statistic that gives us yet another example of just how refreshing his presence must be for loyal Cleveland fans, who stuck with the team through the lowest of lows and may soon be experiencing the complete opposite end of that spectrum.
It was Redditor AcesCharles2 who found the stat that I’m stealing for this article, and it’s a good one. With the Browns’ Week 4 win over the Vikings — a hard-fought, ugly 14-7 victory that featured 13 punts, some stout defense and, thankfully, a potent rushing attack for Cleveland — Stefanski earned his 14th regular season win with the Browns, reaching that mark in 20 total contests.
That 14 is significant, too, because it also represents the total number of Browns wins under not one, not two, but their past three head coaches. Hue Jackson’s time with the team is largely responsible for this statistic being possible, seeing as he oversaw a 3-36-1 stretch of unimaginably bad football. Next in line was interim head coach Gregg Williams, who actually had a positive record (5-3) in his half-season after Jackson’s dismissal. And 2019 saw Freddie Kitchens underwhelm with a 6-10 performance.
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Add those three up, and you have a total of 14 wins… along with a whopping 49 losses in that same span. For Stefanski, his 14th win came only six losses to his name, more than eight times fewer than the Jackson-Williams-Kitchens trio. And if you include his playoff victory over the Steelers in last year’s Wild Card, he’s actually reached 15 wins, already surpassing what those three coaches collectively were able to produce. Go figure.
It’s also telling that a Browns coach hadn’t stuck around or been successful enough — whether or not it was the coach’s fault as opposed to the talent available — to win 14 games since Romeo Crennel did so during his 2005-2008 stint, one that ended with a 24-40 record all in all.
The Browns have the second toughest strength of schedule the rest of the way, according to Tankathon, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect Stefanski to continue compiling wins throughout his second season. As of now, DraftKings Sportsbook has the team’s regular season win total set at over/under 10.5, with a lot more juice on the over (-175) than the under (+135). For all you non-bettors out there, that’s a good sign that an 11-6 season — or better — seems much more likely than the alternative, and that’s a nice thing to hear for a franchise that hasn’t had two consecutive campaigns of double-digit wins since the late 1980s.
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