Cleveland's line held up fine without starting guard Teven Jenkins, giving Watson time to work even after the game restarted from a two-hour lightning delay that pushed the fourth quarter into a downpour. Tampa Bay leaned on Bucky Irving through the mess — 17 carries for 89 yards, including a 38-yard burst — but a run-heavy script in the rain wasn't enough once the Bucs needed points.
Emeka Egbuka's 5-yard touchdown catch put Tampa Bay ahead in the third quarter, and for a while the Buccaneers looked like the team executing the Week 1 script better. Then Denzel Boston beat the Tampa secondary deep for a 55-yard touchdown late in the same period, and the game turned into the shootout neither preview's ledger fully saw coming.
The finishing sequence was Cleveland at its most patient: a 12-play, 68-yard drive that chewed through the fourth quarter and ended with a 17-yard touchdown to Blake Whiteheart, putting the Browns up 23-19 with 3:51 left. Tampa Bay got the ball back for one more shot, but Mayfield's fade to Ted Hurst III in the end zone fell incomplete, and the Buccaneers dropped to 0-2.
Harold Fannin Jr. added five catches for 54 yards to Boston's five for 95, giving Watson two reliable outlets underneath and over the top — the kind of complementary receiving game Cleveland didn't get from anyone but Boston in the opener. Mayfield finished 21-of-34 for 182 yards and a touchdown, a cleaner outing on paper than the three-fumble mess in Cincinnati, but the one turnover that mattered came at the worst possible time.
It's a 1-1 start for Cleveland against a Buccaneers team now looking at 0-2 with a road trip to sort out what went wrong in the fourth quarter two weeks running.