A win is a win ... but ...

So the Browns managed to hold on for a 24-23 win over Carolina yesterday. Hooray and what not. Wins in the NFL are not always easy to come by, especially for the Browns the last few years. But let's not get too giddy. The Panthers are possibly the league's very worst team; certainly one of the worst. They have the league's worst record, at 1-10, and finished dead last in the ESPN power rankings. And the Browns should have demolished them, but instead had to rely on a missed 42-yard field goal on the game's last play.

Oh, there were some things in this game for Browns fans to be thankful for. Peyton Hillis, for example. Hillis was the clear MVP of this game, rumbling for 131 yards on 26 carries to bring his season total to 905, with five games to go. Looks like he'll comfortably top 1,000 yards, and has a chance to beat Jamal Lewis' expansion-era team record of 1,304, set in 2007. And of course, Hillis scored all three of the Browns' touchdowns in this game, on the ground, and even added six catches for 63 yards.

Jake Delhomme, returning as the starter, was serviceable, but he really gave the Panthers life with the interceptions he threw on his first two passes of the second half. The latter of those was returned for a touchdown that brought the Panthers within one at 21-20. But he did complete 24 of 35 passes for 245 yards, which is a perfectly acceptable performance.

But the Browns' defense was a weak point in this game. How many missed tackles were there? Where was the coverage? Brandon LaFell made a good catch on the play that set up the last field goal attempt, but why was he that open? (Incidentally, I believe the officials made an error on that play. It was clearly a catch, but he came down in bounds with five seconds left, and the Panthers were out of time outs. The clock should have kept ticking, and they'd have never been able to get lined up in time to spike the ball before it hit triple-zeroes. It was reviewed for whether he actually caught the ball, but they didn't look at the issue of whether he came down in bounds or out of bounds. I suppose there wouldn't have been much they could have done about it.)

Anyway, this game goes in the books as a win, because that's what the scoreboard said at the end. But if not for a miss on a fairly easy field goal by an experienced kicker, it would have been a loss to the NFL's worst team. So take it with a grain of salt.

I'll leave you with a thought about the pressure of being a kicker in the NFL, or really at any level of football. I was just telling my wife the other day about how that would be the last position I'd want to play on a football team, because you so often come in on situations just like that. If you make the kick, you just did what was expected of you; but if you miss it, you go home feeling that the loss was your fault. (Which, to be honest, it was, at least to some degree.) And John Kasay, the kicker who is wearing goat horns in Carolina today, made postgame comments that reinforce that idea. From the Associated Press story:

"I was the one who failed," Kasay said, accepting blame for Carolina's fourth straight loss. "This is one of those days where they did everything they needed to do to win. I was the one who let them down. There's no other way to cut it."

To the extent that I can feel sorry for a professional athlete for something that happened on the field, I feel a little sorry for him.