May 26, 2026 · NFL · 15 MIN READ

May football is not evidence. It is rehearsal.

But in Cleveland, rehearsal has started to look like procedure. Todd Monken and Travis Switzer are not selling a new story in their first spring with the Browns. They are buying reps, building seconds, and making mistakes cost snaps.

This is a reading of what repetition says before the season is allowed to answer.

The Asterisk

OTAs do not prove anything.

There are no pads. No tackling. No real pocket. No fourth quarter that survives until morning. The pass rush is half a pass rush. The defense lines up but cannot finish. The offense moves the ball, but no one is keeping score. In May, football is a version of football that has been turned down at the volume.

That is the first rule of reading OTAs.

The second rule is almost as important. Teams still tell you something by what they choose to repeat.

The Cleveland Browns will not win anything between now and July. They cannot. The schedule has not begun. The roster is at ninety, not fifty-three. Half the team is in shorts and half the questions cannot be asked yet. But a coaching staff that has been on the job for four months is in front of the players for the first time in real, full-speed work, and the choices they make about how to spend those two hours a day are not random.

There is no game film yet. There is only what gets installed, what gets corrected, what gets repeated, and what gets stopped before the next snap.

That is enough to begin reading.

Building Seconds

The most unusual period in Browns OTA practice this spring does not look like football.

The offense breaks the huddle. The line sets. The quarterback calls cadence. The ball is snapped. The whistle blows.

That is the whole period. No play. No route concept. No defensive read. Snap, whistle, reset.

Travis Switzer, the Browns' first-year offensive coordinator, calls it the perfect operation period. He explains it without ornament. "We're going to emphasize everything until the snap, basically."

What he means is that the Browns are not, in this period, practicing plays. They are practicing the seconds before plays.

Switzer breaks it down to the unit Todd Monken keeps returning to. "Coach Monk talks about the four twos all the time. We're trying to save eight seconds between every play call. That's getting the call in two seconds faster. That's getting in the huddle two seconds faster. That's shortening the call so that when we're in the huddle, we get out two seconds faster. And then it's sprinting to the ball and getting lined up."

Eight seconds across four phases. Two seconds per phase. The math is not a metaphor. It is a budget.

The reason for the budget is that modern NFL defense is mostly disguise. Safeties rotate late. Coverages shift after the offense commits. Pressure looks come and go. A quarterback who gets to the line of scrimmage with eight extra seconds in his hand is a quarterback who can see more of what the defense is willing to show. He can check, and check again, and check a third time. He can ask the defense to declare before he commits.

Switzer puts it plainly. "We want to play the game on our terms, not on the defense's."

That sentence is the clearest version of what the Browns are trying to build on offense right now. Not tempo for the sake of tempo. Not no-huddle as branding. The Browns are trying to take a phase of the game that defenses have steadily learned to weaponize, and pull it back to the offense. The perfect operation period is the drill that builds the surplus. The eight seconds are what the surplus buys.

Switzer borrows an image from Monken to explain why a quarterback specifically needs the surplus. "If you were getting operated on, you wouldn't want the doctor to be rushing in there, sweating, looking like he's rushed." The Browns want to relieve anxiety for the decision maker.

The Browns have had decision-maker problems for years. Switzer is not promising to solve those problems by changing the decision maker. He is promising to give the decision maker, whoever that turns out to be, more time and less anxiety than the last Cleveland quarterback had.

That is not a small offer.

Buying Reps

Monken explains the same project from the other side: not seconds, but reps.

He does not dress it up. Asked late in his Wednesday press conference about the slow walkthroughs the Browns run at the start of practice, he gave one of the most pragmatic answers a head coach gives in the spring.

"We're in the development business. I mean, let's not kid ourselves what business we're in. You don't get 15 first-round picks. You don't get that. You get the picks you get and you've got to develop everybody on your roster."

That sentence reads almost like a shrug. It is not. It is a description of how Cleveland's roster will be built over the next three years. The Browns get a handful of premium picks, not a roster full of them. The rest come from inside the building — drafted, signed undrafted, claimed off another team's practice squad — and then they get developed, or they do not.

A practice that does not produce reps does not produce players.

The problem in late May is that the league restricts how Cleveland can practice. Two hours on the field per day. No tackling. No pads. Limited contact periods. Inside those constraints, Monken is trying to manufacture work the way a college coach manufactures work. "You're used to going more two-spot, trying to find more reps, more walkthrough."

Two-spot means the offense is divided. One quarterback runs a period at one location on the field. Another quarterback runs the same period at another. Twice the reps in the same window. Less first-team work for each quarterback individually, but more total reps across the room. Cleveland has four quarterbacks on the roster. The two-spot is the only way all four get meaningful work in the same practice.

The jog-through serves a similar function. Slow the tempo at the start of practice, and you can split the team further. More groups, more concepts, more opportunities for a player to see the install in motion before he has to execute it at full speed. "The more you slow the tempo down, the more you can divide your guys up, and that allows you to get more opportunity for guys to learn and develop."

This is where the draft becomes visible without becoming the story.

Denzel Boston, the second-round receiver, caught a deep ball from Deshaun Watson during Wednesday's practice that everyone watching mentioned afterward. Monken mentioned it too, but he was careful about what it meant. "You want to see your guys, especially some of your younger draft picks, make some of those plays." Then, a few minutes later, when asked about Boston and the rookie center Parker Brailsford: "The idea is to kind of ease them in as they're learning. But the other guys gotta play better. I mean, there were times with the ones, not good enough. So you'd love to ease them in, but eventually, eventually the easing has to end."

That is not a quote about Boston. That is a quote about how rookies become players in the Browns' offense. The development business runs on a clock. The early reps are protected, the middle reps are gradual, and at some point the protection ends and the rookie either holds up or does not. The rookies who missed the offseason program before the draft missed three weeks of installs. They are catching up in the only way the rules allow. Two-spot. Jog-through. Repeat the install, second coat, third coat.

Switzer's word for this, in his interview that same day, was bricks.

It belongs to the same project as the eight seconds. Different language, different scale, same logic. Reps are not volume. Reps are the only currency a team that does not get fifteen first-round picks can spend.

The Substitution

Penalties were the loudest sound in Cleveland practice this spring.

Not literally. Monken's voice is loud only when it has to be, and the players are not yet at the stage where they jaw at each other across the line. But penalties, as a category of problem, dominated his press conference more than the quarterback competition did. Asked how the Browns plan to clean up mental mistakes early in the offseason, he gave a five-step answer that almost no one quoted in full.

"We certainly have the officials out here. Certainly, they give us a report every day. And then we look at it and try to clean it up. We address it in each of the rooms. Certainly there at the end, take a guy out. It's all right. It's okay. We'll play someone else."

The first three steps are routine. Officials at practice, daily reports, position-room meetings. Most NFL teams do at least one of those. Many do all three. The fourth step is where Cleveland's procedure becomes visible.

Take a guy out.

The phrase is plain, and Monken says it plainly. The player who jumps offside leaves the field for the next snap. The player who misses an assignment is corrected in the room, and if it happens again, he is replaced. The replacement is not a punishment, in Monken's framing. It is just the next item on the practice script.

"It's all right. It's okay. We'll play someone else."

That is the methodological point. The Browns are not staging a culture moment when they substitute. They are running a procedure. The penalty is the trigger. The substitution is the response. The correction happens in the room afterward, not on the field. Nobody gets yelled at in front of the press. Somebody gets replaced.

This is how accountability shows up in Cleveland in May. Not as a slogan. As a lost rep.

The economics of the previous block apply here too. In a development business, reps are currency. A player who takes himself off the field with a false start has spent his own currency on nothing. The next player is going to use that rep instead. Over a full spring, the math compounds. The players who keep their reps move up the depth chart. The players who burn them through penalties do not.

Monken's view of where the penalties are coming from is specific. "Ultimately, you're not going to be an elite football team if you have penalties. So all you're going to do, continue to do, is keep emphasizing it, especially with cadence. To me, that's the biggest thing."

Cadence starts with the quarterback and the offensive line. It is the snap count, the motion timing, the shared trust that everyone hears the same thing at the same moment. It is part of the seconds before the play begins, the seconds Switzer is trying to buy back. False starts, illegal motions, encroachments on the defensive side, these are the penalties that destroy the operation period before it can become a play. The four twos do not survive a five-yard walkback.

The defense is not exempt from the procedural language. Asked about the day's defensive highlights, Monken did not celebrate them. "Yeah, we threw interceptions in seven-on-seven, for God's sakes. I mean, who does that? There's no pass rush. I mean, it's embarrassing."

That is also a procedure quote, not a frustration quote. The seven-on-seven period exists to drill timing, footwork, and coverage. There is no pass rush. The quarterback has no reason to force a ball. An interception there is not defensive brilliance. It is offensive operation failure. Monken is embarrassed because his offense, in a period designed to remove pressure, is producing the kind of mistake the pressure is supposed to cause.

The cleanup, in Monken's procedure, will be the same. Officials report. Room meeting. Take a guy out. Play someone else. The substitution is not theatrical. It is the next item on the script.

The Ugly Position

All of this eventually returns to the position the Browns have failed to settle for most of their modern existence.

The Browns have four quarterbacks on the roster. Deshaun Watson, Shedeur Sanders, Dillon Gabriel, Taylen Green. Monken's plan for them is the two-spot. Each practice, two quarterbacks work with the ones at different locations on the field, then they rotate. The Browns do not need to name one until Jacksonville, which is the first game of the season.

Asked who is ahead, Monken answered with one word.

"No."

Asked when he might have an answer, he gave the only honest version available in May.

"You'd love to have it at every position at the end of spring, but you can't guarantee that. We'll have it set for Jacksonville."

What is visible now is mixed at best.

Watson took most of the first-team reps early in Wednesday's practice. He looks healthier than he has in years. His arm works, his footwork is cleaner, and the athleticism Monken keeps mentioning is back in the practice film. "His athleticism is one of his superpowers," Monken said. That is sportswriter shorthand for a quarterback who can move when the protection breaks down. Watson can. He still throws balls that should not be thrown. He is more mobile than accurate right now.

Sanders has been more interesting than expected, in the structural sense. Monken’s read is careful. “I think Shedeur’s come miles in terms of his progressions, getting the ball out, his understanding of concepts. I think he’s really, really come a long way.” Progressions, ball out, concepts. Those are the three things a rookie quarterback most often fails at, and Monken is saying Sanders is doing them. He is not saying Sanders is the starter. He is saying Sanders has made the competition harder to dismiss.

That does not mean Sanders was clean. He threw an interception in seven-on-seven, and Gabriel did too, the kind of mistakes Monken called embarrassing for the offense as a unit. Gabriel is still in the room. Green is the developmental outlier, a late-round traits project at the bottom of the depth chart, in the building because Monken’s development business runs four quarterbacks at a time and not three.

This is what the room actually looks like. One veteran with a complicated past and visible athleticism. One rookie who is learning faster than Cleveland publicly expected. One incumbent backup who is still throwing the wrong ball in the wrong period. One project. The competition is real because none of the four has separated. The competition is uninspiring, as Zac Jackson put it, because none of them has separated either.

The quarterback competition is not the exception to Monken's process. It is the reason the process has to exist.

If the Browns had a settled starter, the eight seconds would be a refinement. If they had a settled starter, the two-spot would be a courtesy. They have neither. The reps are not abundance, they are necessity. The operation period is not a luxury, it is a substitute for the certainty Cleveland does not have at the position the operation is built around.

That is also why the parts of the offense that do not throw the ball matter more than they would on another team.

Quinshon Judkins is back at practice earlier than expected. Monken's language about him is unusually direct. "I think his rare trait is he's a bull. Like, refuses to go down. And we don't even get to see that here." Judkins cannot show his best trait in OTAs because there is no tackling. But the structural function is visible without contact — a lead runner the Browns can give the ball to on first down and not apologize about it. Spencer Fano is taking left tackle reps. Parker Brailsford is being eased in at center, but the easing has an end date. The line is not finished, but it is more clearly drawn than it was six months ago.

If Cleveland wants this quarterback competition to become playable, it will need help from the parts of the offense that do not throw the ball. The line has to hold. Judkins has to carry. The receivers have to separate against zone, which they can, and against man, which is the question. The best way to make the quarterback room less central is to make everything around it more reliable.

That may be the most honest thing OTAs can show.

September Speaks Later

None of this means the Browns are fixed.

It does not name a quarterback. It does not make Watson accurate, Sanders ready, Gabriel cleaner or Green closer to playing. It does not guarantee Fano at left tackle, Brailsford at center or Judkins as the stabilizer of an offense still looking for one. May cannot do that.

What May can show is smaller and more useful. It can show what a coach chooses to repeat. It can show what an offense chooses to clean up before the ball is even snapped. It can show whether a mistake is treated as a story or as the next rep lost.

The Browns are buying reps. The Browns are building seconds. The Browns are letting penalties cost snaps. The Browns are trying to make the quarterback room less exposed by making everything around it more reliable. None of that is a fix. All of it is a procedure.

A procedure can be tested. A story cannot.

The Browns are not trying to win May. They are trying to make September less surprising.

Maybe that is where a new regime begins. Not with a better story. With the next snap after a bad one.

Author · Olaf Kozany