Browns to Get on Schedule This Week

After a long preseason the Cleveland Browns will look to get into their routine for the regular season this week. While its importance can be overlooked it is a critical component to ending the preseason phase of the year.

Training camp and preseason has a cadence to it that requires both rigor and flexibility for both players and coaches. The schedule itself of playing a majority of games on Thursday and Friday nights during the preseason can be a challenge. Now mix that in with the elongated preseason due to playing in the Hall of Fame game along with scheduled joint practices and you can see how getting into a routine could be an arduous task. 

This part of the season has been all about putting in Head Coach Kevin Stefanski's favorite word- 'work,' everyday. To this point everyday has been about your own team and your own performance. The days are filled with as much practice time as the league will allow and when you aren't on the field you are likely in weight rooms or meeting rooms trying to get better as a player and as a team.

All of the time is spent on your own playbook, coaching your players on the execution of every single play. Coaches are evaluating players and learning what there strengths are, the personnel department spends countless hours self-scouting the roster that they built for its weaknesses. One week you are in West Virginia, the next in Cleveland and the week after in Philly.

With week 1 right around the corner and with the preseason coming to a close, a big focus for your Cleveland Browns this week will be treating the week as a normal game week. While this may seem minor, it is actually a very important component of the offseason program.

While it may seem that this kind of frantic pace is par for the course of life in the NFL, however, that is not the case. You see with the regular season comes the ability to get into a regular routine. With a majority of your games being played on Sunday afternoon teams are able to settle into a rhythm league wide.

A typical NFL workweek looks like the following:

Sunday: Game vs opponent

Monday: Film room, meetings and time spent with trainers and medical staff. 

Tuesday: Off-Day

Wednesday: Practice

Thursday: Practice

Friday: Practice

Saturday: Walkthrough and travel if playing on the road.

Teams will adjust accordingly during the season for game weeks where they have one on a Monday or Thursday night. This is why so many players and coaches detest the Thursday night game.

For the Browns they are attempting to mimic the regular season schedule for the first time this week. In addition to the starters playing, this will also be the first week where coaches will be actively game planning for an opponent. Not so much the Chiefs but rather the Week 1 opponent, the Cincinnati Bengals.

For this week the Browns have just moved everything up a day with the 1 p.m. Saturday kickoff against the Chiefs. It looks like this:

Monday: Off-Day

Tuesday: Practice @ 1:25 pm

Wednesday: Practice @ 1:25 pm

Thursday: Practice @ 11:30 am

Friday: Walkthrough and travel to Kansas City

Saturday: Game against Chiefs @ 1 pm

This will be a close simulation of what normal will look like for the players and coaches. The team will fly back to Cleveland following the game and with the roster needing to be cut down to 53 by Tuesday at 4pm, we might begin seeing reports of players being cut beginning Sunday. Be sure to follow along with us as we will have an up to date list of reported cuts as they come in.