The easy story of the 2025 Cleveland Browns was the quarterback carousel — Joe Flacco, Dillon Gabriel, Shedeur Sanders, take a number. The harder story, and the truer one, was the five guys in front of them. Cleveland's offensive line failed on two separate mechanisms this season: pass protection collapsed into one of the worst QB-hit rates in football, and run blocking cratered on the left side and up the middle while the right side kept humming. Both problems predated every quarterback change, and both were the through-line to the worst pass offense in the NFL.

Table of Contents

• A four-year hit-rate slide
• Same line, three very different QB experiences
• The run game has a left-side problem
• The bottom line

A four-year hit-rate slide

Cleveland allowed a QB hit on 20.9% of dropbacks in 2025 — 134 hits across 641 dropbacks, per the play-by-play hit-charting data (the qb_hit flag on every dropback, regular season plus Cleveland's 2023 playoff game). Only Minnesota (21.2%) allowed a higher rate leaguewide. That wasn't a one-year blip; it was the fourth straight year the number climbed:

The line got measurably worse at keeping bodies off the quarterback in each of the last three seasons, and the 2025 rate was roughly 5.3 percentage points higher than 2022's. Whatever mix of retirements, injuries, and roster construction was behind it, this wasn't a small-sample wobble — it was a trend.

(Note on methodology: this uses the standard nflverse play-by-play qb_hit indicator, which differs from PFF-style "pressure rate" — hits are a stricter, charted subset of pressures. Readers comparing this figure to a pressure-rate stat elsewhere should expect a lower number here by design.)

Same line, three very different QB experiences

Here's where the "it's the quarterbacks" argument got thin. All three of Cleveland's 2025 passers played behind essentially the same protection unit, and their hit rates diverged sharply:

Sanders got hit on nearly three of every ten dropbacks — a rate almost double Gabriel's behind the same offensive line. Some of that is fairly attributed to the rookie: 40-year-old Flacco had a lifetime of pocket sense to draw on, and Sanders was still learning where the checkdown lived. But the raw gap is startling enough that when Sanders's struggles come up, it's worth remembering he was absorbing contact at a rate no starter in the league is designed to survive.

The team-level pass EPA reflected it. Cleveland finished 2025 at -0.288 EPA/play on passes — dead last in the NFL, worse than Tennessee (-0.221), Minnesota (-0.188), and every other bottom-tier passing team. It was also the worst pass-EPA season Cleveland posted in the four-year window: -0.036 in 2022, -0.195 in 2023, -0.245 in 2024, -0.288 in 2025.

The run game has a left-side problem

If pass protection was a broad-spectrum failure, the run blocking had a much more surgical problem. Here's where Cleveland's carries went in 2025 and how they fared against the league:

The two bolded interior/left rows were the wound. Left-guard runs went for 2.39 yards per carry with -0.215 EPA/play against league averages of 3.98 YPC and -0.074 EPA — Cleveland lost about 1.6 yards and 0.14 EPA on every attempt through the left A/B gap. Middle runs — the biggest bucket, 115 carries — got stuffed at or behind the line on 20.9% of attempts versus a league rate of 15.4%. Left tackle was similarly ugly at a 27.5% stuff rate.

Then there was the right side. Right-end carries went for 5.76 YPC and +0.204 EPA/play, both meaningfully better than league average. Right-guard carries matched the league EPA figure almost exactly (-0.040 vs. -0.040). Right tackle ran a shade below league YPC but was roughly neutral in EPA. Cleveland's offensive line, in other words, wasn't failing to run block across the board — it was failing specifically on one half of the formation and up the middle. That reads like a personnel signature, not a total scheme collapse.

The bottom line

The two failure modes matter because they suggest two different fixes. The pass-protection problem was broad — every quarterback the Browns rolled out got hit at close to the league's highest rate, and the four-year trendline says this had been getting worse for a while. The run-blocking problem was localized — the right side was fine, the left interior was a hole. Together they produced the single worst pass offense in football, one that no rookie quarterback, veteran quarterback, or third-string veteran quarterback was going to rescue on his own.

Sanders's -0.299 EPA/dropback will likely get quoted all offseason as evidence about the rookie. It's fairer to quote it alongside his 28.9% hit rate — because whoever Cleveland puts under center in 2026 will be standing behind the same left guard spot and the same middle of the line.