CLEVELAND TEAMS

The Browns have been riding a roller coaster this season with all the changes at quarterback and the inconsistent play by the team. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that this is the new norm in the NFL. Few teams are consistently good, and then there are several that are consistently terrible. With everyone else, the quality of play varies dramatically from week to week. With teams like the Browns we’ve seen mini streak where everything seemed to go well and others where everything goes wrong.

The bottom line is that you can never read too much into one or even several games. After two starts it looked like Jason Campbell might save the season for the Browns, and expectations were high heading into yesterday’s Bengals game. Unfortunately, Campbell’s miserable performance was coupled with a special teams’ meltdown, completely wasting the opportunities provided by Joe Haden and the defense and the lame performance by Andy Dalton. Everything went wrong yesterday.

Now the Steelers are coming into town. The Browns are two-point favorites, which means this is essentially a pick em’ game since the home team usually gets the benefit of three points. The Steelers were left for dead at the beginning of the season, but Big Ben is still one of the best in the NFL, and if he gets some protection he’s still very dangerous. Many of us were looking forward to a Browns beat-down of the old and declining Steelers, but all of a sudden the matchup of Jason Campbell vs a resurgent Ben Roethlisberger doesn’t look so great.

This game seems impossible to predict. Which Browns team will show up? Which Steelers team will show up? You can’t read too much into yesterday’s games as I pointed out above, so this one might not be your best bet if you’re looking to pick games against the spread this week. You can do all the research you want on this game and find a good site for your picks by checking out this site which does independent ranking based on customers and reviews. But you might be better off passing on this one in favor of another game.