FOXBORO, Mass. — Myles Garrett knew the Cleveland Browns were sunk. He said it repeatedly, late last season. He waited until the week of the Super Bowl to formally make the trade request he’d been teasing, and he followed that with a media tour during which he said he wanted to play for a contender. He knew he couldn’t do that where he’d spent his first eight NFL seasons.
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Then came March, and Garrett reversed course. He signed a contract extension worth more than $122 million in guaranteed money and an annual average of $40 million, at the time the biggest contract any non-quarterback had received. The tight-lipped Browns came close to acknowledging they were in the midst of another rebuilding project, but they were open about their intent to never trade Garrett and keep him as part of both their short- and long-term planning.
Fast forward, and here’s Garrett wrecking shop. And here are the Browns, sinking further into irrelevance and watching another season slip away. The New England Patriots withstood Garrett’s big day and one early push by the impotent Cleveland offense Sunday before pulling away in the second half for their fifth straight win. The final score was 32-13. Outside the first 10 minutes, it never actually felt that close.
When Garrett sacked Drake Maye for the fifth time in Sunday’s fourth quarter, the score was 30-7. By the end, Maye was patiently orchestrating a clock-killing offense, and Garrett was furiously slamming his helmet to the ground on the Browns’ sideline.
Another week, another complete (and familiar) failure by a Browns offense that can’t throw the ball downfield, doesn’t have wide receivers who scare anyone and has scored more than 17 points this season only with strong help from the defense. Garrett had five of the Browns’ six sacks Sunday, and they still got blown out.
“I’m frustrated,” Garrett said. “I want to win. I don’t care how much time is on the clock. They got their starters in. There’s a chance we can win. I want to be a part of that. I don’t care how dire the situation looks, I want to try to make something happen. So I hate coming out of those situations. I hate, you know, that kind of inevitability and not being able to do anything about it. I want to win, and I’ll do anything.”
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As for the repetitive nature of the whole thing, Garrett said, “It doesn’t get any easier each week you ask me (that).”
He signed up for this. This whole cycle. Besides Garrett’s new marks in various record books, the only good that came from the Browns falling to 2-6 after eight games for the second straight year is that Cleveland potentially helped its 2026 draft position — and might have spurred the folks in charge to be more aggressive in thinking about the future ahead of the Nov. 4 trade deadline.
Given the big guarantees and up-front money associated with Garrett’s new deal, it’s unlikely the Browns would consider trading him now.
Though his first two sacks came on third-down situations with the Patriots in the red zone, the Browns couldn’t keep up. After opening the game with a 70-yard scoring drive capped by a Dillon Gabriel pass to fellow rookie Harold Fannin Jr., the Browns sputtered and had only 113 yards at halftime. Gabriel was intercepted twice in the third quarter, and the Patriots feasted, turning it into a three-score game that left the home team really worried only about Garrett and staying healthy.
“Committing two people to (Garrett) and him still affecting the quarterback is obviously impressive,” Patriots coach and ex-Browns employee Mike Vrabel said. “I’m glad that we don’t play him twice every year unless we’re both in the playoffs.”
Whether Vrabel was getting personal with that last line or not doesn’t matter. Both he and Garrett know the state of the Browns well.
That fifth sack Sunday broke Garrett’s own franchise record set in a 4.5-sack game in a win over the Chicago Bears in 2021. He has 10 sacks on the season, tied for the most in the league with Brian Burns of the New York Giants. With 112.5 for his career, he passed Reggie White for the most sacks by a player before his 30th birthday. He joins White and John Randle as the only players in NFL history to have 10-plus sacks in at least eight seasons.
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Meanwhile, a Browns offense that entered the game ranked in the bottom five in most categories couldn’t build on its early success. No one is fully blaming Gabriel — again, this all sounds familiar — but he’s clearly overmatched. Jerry Jeudy is supposed to be Cleveland’s No. 1 wide receiver, but he went without a catch. And after Gabriel avoided turnovers over his first three starts, sometimes only by good fortune, the Patriots were waiting on his misses.
After getting one first down in the second quarter, the Browns went three-and-out to start the second half. Their next two possessions ended in interceptions, the first of which was returned to the Cleveland 6-yard line to set up a touchdown and put the game out of reach.
The Patriots had the ball three times in the third quarter. On 15 total plays, they scored three touchdowns.
From the 1:48 mark of the first quarter to the 3:52 mark of the third quarter, the Browns ran 23 plays. On those 23, they totaled 41 yards and two first downs. They were intercepted twice and had a long gain in that span of 21 on a pass from Gabriel to Jamari Thrash with a little more than four minutes left in the first half. That series ended with a punt after an attempted double pass on third-and-14 went awry and Gage Larvadain had to tuck the ball and scramble for 3 yards. The Browns had tried a flea-flicker earlier on that series that ended up in Gabriel throwing the ball away.
“When their gimmick plays ran out, we played pretty good defense,” Vrabel said.
After the game, Browns coach Kevin Stefanski said multiple times that the Browns “are going to look at everything” with their next game two weeks away. He did affirm the team’s commitment to keeping Gabriel as the starter for Nov. 9 at the New York Jets, but he said all other potential changes are on the table.
Browns rookie running back Quinshon Judkins left Sunday’s game in the second half with a shoulder injury, the extent of which is still unknown. Rookie linebacker Carson Schwesinger suffered a high ankle sprain in the fourth quarter and will almost certainly miss some time.
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Judkins has been the offense’s best player — with Fannin not far behind. But there’s not much help coming from anywhere else, and the rushed decision to turn to Gabriel after four games has pretty much established only that the Browns are limited in a lot of areas and that Gabriel’s physical limitations aren’t helping matters.
“I see a young quarterback that’s fighting,” Garrett said of Gabriel. “I see a young team that’s fighting all across the board. So we’ve all got to help each other, and there’s no one on the outside who’s going to help us. There’s no one who’s going to come in with a magic cure-all. So we have to rally together and find the best way to win as a unit, as a team. Because we’re the only people who can get out of this.
“We dug ourselves in this hole. So we’ve got to keep on working to get out of it.”
April’s NFL Draft is a mere 179 days away. And as the Browns left Sunday evening to begin their journey back to Cleveland, peering far into the future seemed to be the only way to look toward anything resembling the kind of fix Garrett will need to see if he has any legitimate hope of playing on the playoff stage soon.
