Remember days before the start of the season, when NFL Network analyst and former Ravens coach Brian Billick suggested the Browns would be hard-pressed to win a single game?

Billick quickly walked back the comment, though he rightly maintained that the Browns had a difficult schedule, one that wasn't helped by "Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill running the front office."

So here we are two months later, and the Browns are 0-9 and facing the very real possibility of not winning a single game. They face the Ravens on Thursday. Vegas has them as 10-point underdogs. Then they face the Steelers, Giants, Bengals, Bills, Chargers and Steelers again, so that win will be hard to achieve. It's to the point where first-year coach Hue Jackson has to publicly defend one of his players who promised the team would muster at least one victory this season.

"I support him 100 percent,'' Jackson said of linebacker Chris Kirksey (via Cleveland.com). "Somehow, someway, we are going to find a way not to be 0-16. That's not where we want to be. We don't want to be 0-9 right now to be very honest with you. We're going to fight our tails off, and it starts on Thursday night [against the Ravens] again.

"Our guys come in here every week with the mindset of 'Look, we are going to go back out here, we are going to do it again, we are going to give you everything we have and we are going to go try and change this.' That is what they have been doing."

To Jackson's credit, he has remained upbeat through some pretty depressing football, even by Cleveland standards.

"I do believe there are a lot of good things that are going on here," he said. "It just hasn't shown up in the win ledger. That's unfortunate because that's why all of us do what we do. It's about wins and losses.''