Scout’s Eye: Patriots ready, Browns’ misery and playoff focus

With the playoffs upon us, the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers have to be feeling very good about their prospects.

The NFL regular season has concluded. While there were many teams that didn’t have their playoff lives on the line on Sunday, as usual, Week 17 showed us some things to build on for the postseason or even for 2018.

This week we will see Atlanta at Los Angeles and Carolina in New Orleans in the NFC. The AFC Wild Card round will feature Jacksonville hosting the Bills and the Titans traveling to Kansas City.

Pittsburgh sat many of its key players and the Browns still couldn’t get their first win of the season. Turnovers killed this team all year and that was once again a big problem, but the Browns also finally caused some turnovers as well.

After accumulating -18 yards on their first three drives, Cleveland then hit two big plays, one to Josh Gordon and one to Rashard Higgins, to stay in the game. Cleveland and DeShone Kizer did a poor job of recognizing and picking up blitzes and we saw the rookie quarterback continue to hold the ball in the pocket longer than he should. Mike Hilton also dropped what should have been a third quarter interception. But all was not lost for the Browns and believe it or not, this remains a team with a ton of upside if managed and coached properly.

These teams met in Week 1 and it doesn’t seem like there is anything to get excited about here after 16 straight losses. But Kizer made a lot of big runs and several impressive throws.

Despite not getting much help from coaching or scheme, Kizer has improved since that Week 1 meeting. The only starter inactive on Pittsburgh’s defense was Cameron Heyward, which bodes well for Cleveland’s offense. In Ben Roethlisberger’s absence, Landry Jones looked very comfortable and played a highly-efficient game and JuJu Smith-Schuster has come on like gangbusters, but again, the Browns defense wasn’t clearly overmatched.

This was an entertaining game with a terrible drop by Corey Coleman on fourth down with under two minutes on the clock to assure Cleveland would not get a victory. That Coleman play sums up the Browns season in many ways: This is not a 0-16 roster and rarely did this team get totally blown out this year, but self-inflicted wounds destroy you in this league as they did today.

Once again the Browns have loads of salary cap space and not only have the first overall pick, but the fourth as well plus Houston’s second rounder. Do they have the right head coach though?