BEREA, Ohio — There won’t be any talk of elves to fire the Browns up this weekend when they host the Cincinnati Bengals.
Cincy‘s star receiver Ja’Marr Chase is changing up his usual pregame trash talking strategy.
“I’m tired of being the villain on social media,” Chase told Bengals reporters this week. “I still do it, but I’m tired of seeing the stuff on Twitter every day. You know?”
Chase certainly made himself the villain in Cleveland last year and gave the Browns some bulletin board material before the 2023 season opener when he referred to Cleveland as “the Elves.”
“It feels like a regular game to me,” Chase said a year ago. “It don’t feel no different. It’s just the hooping and hollering about the Cleveland Browns. I was about to call them the elves. But, yeah.”
Chase also channeled JuJu Smith-Schuster on the Browns by adding “Cleveland is Cleveland,” when he was asked last year about the hype surrounding the Browns’ defense.
“Uh, I don’t really hear it,” Chase said at the time. “If you ask me, I don’t really pay attention to it because Cleveland is Cleveland. I look forward to the matchups that we have when we’re facing them, but other than that, I don’t really be caring.”
The Browns used those words as motivation last year in their 24-3 win at home to open the season. A bunch of players got on social media after that game to post “Cleveland is Cleveland,” a message sent loud and clear and directed at Chase.
It wasn’t the first time Chase handed the Cleveland DBs some extra motivation on a silver platter.
In the 2022 offseason, Chase appeared on The Pivot Podcast and said that Browns’ cornerback Greg Newsome II was not elite. Newsome remembered, and referred to that comment multiple times over the previous two years.
The Browns are in a much different place than they were this time a year ago, at 1-5 and trying to shake off an incredibly slow start with a defense that ranks middle-of-the-pack in just about every major stat and an offense that has been arguably the worst in the league.
But for this matchup, their first AFC North game of the year, Cleveland doesn‘t need any extra motivation to get up.
“I’m just excited for the matchup,” Newsome said. “We’re definitely battling. As soon as we both got drafted here, that was one of the guys (Chase) that I circled that I was super excited to go against. So it’s going to be a lot more of that, just battling with one of the top of league guys in the league against some of the best cornerbacks in the league. So it’s definitely going to be a fun matchup for us.
“It’s all fun man. He’s a guy like us out there. He’s a competitor, he is a warrior and we’re just excited to go ahead and get another attack at him. So we’re excited.”
The Browns may be 1-5 to start the season, but against the Bengals in their last 12 meetings, Cleveland is 9-3. Chase has gone 2-3 against Cleveland over the three previous seasons, with 27 catches, 252 yards and one touchdown. One of those wins came in the season finale last year when the Browns, with a playoff spot secured, opted to rest their starters.
“I respect it,” Martin Emerson Jr. said of Chase’s decision not to trash talk them publicly pregame. “You can’t talk too soon. You can make sure you back up your play, you feel me? So whatever you say, just be about it. There’s been some times if you may say something and you don’t back it up, then it’s going to backfire. So I respect it.”
The Browns of course, also have their own issues to worry about currently as they try and stop their season from slipping further down the drain.
This week, defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz called out the Browns cornerbacks specifically for failing to live up to their potential so far this season.
There were examples of that in three key plays in Sunday’s 20-16 loss to the Eagles: Emerson gave up a 22-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Brown; Newsome got stuck in traffic on a 45-yard crossing route for a TD to DeVonta Smith; and Newsome gave up the game-sealing 40-yard pass to Brown at the end to the Browns’ 12-yard line that allowed Philadelphia to kneel out the clock.
“I expect more from our corners,” Schwartz said. “We challenged our corners to improve their play for us. I’ve been very strong in saying that I think our corners are the best group in the NFL. We haven’t played that way so far this year. We’ve played that way in spots, but that’s not the game of football. You have to be consistent and you look at some of the plays,”
The play of the corners this season is reflected in their Pro Football Focus grades — albeit, those don’t always match the Browns’ internal assessment. Denzel Ward is ranked No. 54 league-wide among qualifying cornerbacks with a 64.0 grade, Newsome is ranked 106 with a 51.2 grade, and Emerson is ranked 112 with a 43.5 grade. Last season, Newsome and Ward were tied for 42nd at 69.6, and Emerson was 63rd at 65.8.
Last week in Philadelphia, Newsome earned a 29.2 grade, the worst mark among 18 Browns defenders. Ward earned a 49.1 for 13th, and Emerson earned a 61.6 for eighth. The trio has yet to grab its first interception (the only Browns interception has come from linebacker Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah), and has dropped a couple of would-be picks.
“Whenever one of our leaders challenges us, we obviously take it personally, but we also use it to motivate us,” Newsome said of Schwartz. “He has all the trust in us. He trusts us the most out of anybody. So when he comes, we look at it as that, it’s not anything else than that. He has so much faith in us, obviously by the way he calls games and everything, he puts it in our hands and we haven’t been doing our best so far, but we’re going to definitely find a way to fix it.”
Emerson agreed that a callout like Schwartz’s is all about mutual respect.
“I know they have our back, we got to show them and play and prove that we have his back with the calls and everything,” he said. “So just being on the top of our game basically. And that’s a good challenge and wouldn’t want to be coached any other way like that.”
While Chase is staying quiet in the press, he made no such promises for during the game.
Actually, it was the exact opposite.
“I do it on the field,” Chase said. “Right now, it’s not for y’all. I’ve got to be professional right now, When I’m on the field, I can be a little grit, a little gritty.”
In that case, game on, say the Browns.
“I don’t know what I say half of the time on the field, whatever comes to my head I say,” Newsome said. “But like I said, it’s just fun when you’re going against a division rival that you play twice a year going against a great set of receivers, that’s a cornerback’s dream. So we’re just super excited.”
The memory of the elves talk will never fully be shelved with this Cleveland group.
