You’d think the Cleveland Browns would be running out of ways to embarrass themselves by this point.
Back in 2022, fed up—apparently—with not having won a division title this century, the franchise decided to sell its soul by trading three first-round picks (plus whatever affection several decades of being the NFL’s lovable losers had earned them) for quarterback Deshaun Watson. At the time of the trade, more than 20 women had filed lawsuits against Watson, saying he committed sexual misconduct and/or sexual assault during massage appointments. But the Browns made the trade, and they didn’t just agree to pay Watson an unprecedented $230 million guaranteed for five years; they also wrote bespoke language into the contract that protected Watson from the financial fallout of the 11-game suspension he served that year.
The Browns did all that for football reasons—or at least that seems to be their justification.
Well.
Three weeks into this NFL season—Watson’s third with the Browns—Watson is one of the worst quarterbacks in football. Other than Bryce Young, who has been benched by the Panthers, he ranks last in the league in total quarterback rating, yards per attempt, yards per dropback, success rate, and explosive play rate. He’s thrown three touchdowns and two interceptions in three games, and the Browns have yet to score more than 20 points in a game. Watson has been sacked a league-high 16 times, eight of which came in a home loss to the Giants last Sunday.
There’s bad, there’s historically bad, and then there’s historically bad for the Cleveland Browns, and Watson has been all three. So far, he’s having the least productive start to a season by any Browns quarterback this century. Basically the whole back of the jersey.
You’ll note that, were it not for dear Brady Quinn in 2009, Watson would occupy the bottom two rungs on that list. Even so, Watson’s performance to start last season ranked third worst.
And yet, it was not exactly hard to see this coming. Around 11 months ago, when Watson was in and out of the Browns’ lineup with conflicting information coming out about his health, I wrote this, describing his baseline performance:
In the nine-game sample size of his Cleveland tenure … he’s averaged just 198 passing yards per game, completed 60.3 percent of his passes, and thrown touchdowns on 4 percent of them and interceptions on 2.6 percent. His yards per pass attempt is 6.5. All those figures are markedly worse than how he played in his 53 games as the Houston Texans starter. … He may get better, but who Watson is today is a quarterback of average accuracy who is jittery in the pocket and often seems to be sensing pressure that isn’t there.
The sample size is now 15 games, but pretty much everything else is the same. Watson has gone from a quarterback acquired under morally reprehensible circumstances who hadn’t played well in three years to a quarterback acquired under morally reprehensible circumstances who hasn’t played well in four years. There are simply no football excuses left. He’s had time to learn Kevin Stefanski’s system. At least this season, he’s healthy. There’s no reason to think Watson will become anything close to the quarterback he was in Houston ever again. The Browns still owe him nearly $100 million, and the NFL is currently investigating him after a woman filed a lawsuit earlier this month in which she says Watson sexually assaulted her during a date in 2020.
And as that ugly, uncomfortable reality sinks in, the Browns must figure out what to do with the uncuttable player on the untradable contract who’s currently playing some of the worst football in the league.
There are few options—none of them good—for how this will all end.
The biggest short-term question is whether Watson will be benched this season. The Athletic has reported that he probably won’t be. Given how poor his play has been through three games, if Stefanski isn’t making that move now, it’s hard to imagine what level Watson’s play would have to sink to in order for that to change.
Still, it’s not hard to believe that backup Jameis Winston (who, it’s worth noting, served a suspension in 2018 following an NFL investigation into a report from an Uber driver who said the then-Buccaneers quarterback touched her in an inappropriate and sexual manner in 2016) would give the Browns a better chance to win. Winston has started only 10 games since 2020 and is no one’s idea of an ideal franchise quarterback, but neither was Joe Flacco last year when he came off the couch and went 4-1, helping the Browns clinch a wild-card playoff spot when Watson was hurt.
Somewhat ironically, the Browns are a team that should be set up to win with average quarterback play—just like they did last season with Flacco. As far as football and team-building philosophies go, they aren’t so different from San Francisco or Minnesota: teams that have won (or are winning) with stellar defense and system quarterbacks Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold, respectively. And perhaps in turning to Winston, one benefit for Cleveland would be an increased willingness to play to those strengths.
Watson’s on-field struggles have been emphasized by the fact that, while he plays, the Browns seem intent on running their offense as if he’s his prime self—a guy who could navigate a pocket and throw on the run and accurately complete deep passes. Despite his sky-high sack rate, Watson has dropped back more than any other quarterback this season. Against the Giants, whose lone defensive strength is their pass rush, Watson handed the ball off just five times in the first half.
Odds are, at some point, the Browns will agree to eat a major dead salary cap charge to move on from Watson. The question is when and how large. Last offseason, the Broncos set a record when they agreed to take an $85 million dead cap hit to cut Russell Wilson.
Should the Browns cut Watson after this season, his dead cap charge would total $172 million, according to Over the Cap. If the Browns took this on, they couldn’t roster an entire team of players—not even on minimum-salary deals. So that’s probably out.
If they wait another year and cut Watson after the 2025 season, they’ll take on a $99 million dead cap charge. That’s massive but not so much worse than what the Broncos did with Wilson. NFL teams are starting to be willing to take these massive charges if it helps them rip the Band-Aid off.
I think that’s the most likely scenario. But there’s an unfortunate wild card at play: the lawsuit.
Earlier this month, another woman filed a lawsuit against Watson, saying that he had sexually assaulted her. She said it took place in October 2020, on a date with Watson at her apartment. She described a more violent manner of assault than the other 24 women who filed suits for assault or harassment between 2020 and 2022 (23 of those suits have been settled).
So far, very little has happened in response. The NFL has said that it is investigating the claims; the Browns have said that they’re deferring to the NFL’s investigation. The league is not placing Watson on the commissioner’s exempt list based on the new suit, per the precedent set in 2021, when he was on the Texans’ active roster all year.
There is some question (albeit a gross one) of whether another lawsuit could provide the Browns with a way to get out of Watson’s albatross of a contract. According to NBC’s ProFootballTalk, language in the deal required Watson to disclose in 2022 any potential future legal exposure of this kind (the actual wording uses the phrase “moral turpitude”).
If Watson did not tell the Browns this additional lawsuit could be coming, they could, in theory, try to claim he violated the terms of his deal. But it’s hard to read the tea leaves when it comes to whether or not Cleveland was expecting this. According to Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer, it did not include the same protections for income against suspension for 2024, 2025, or 2026 in Watson’s original deal that it did for 2022 and 2023. The Browns also restructured Watson’s deal this past August, essentially converting salary into bonus money to spread out the cap charges and free up salary cap space for this year. That’s not a move a team does if it has any long-term concerns about its quarterback.
It feels twisted to even consider that another lawsuit against and potential NFL suspension for Watson might be the thing that gets the Browns out of their Faustian bargain. If that ends up happening, it would be the ultimate admission that, despite making testaments to his character, the Browns only ever looked at Watson’s behavior in terms of what he could give them on the field.
But we already knew that.
The Browns’ decision was indefensible in 2022, and it’s indefensible now. That was never going to change, no matter how well or poorly Watson played. To say the trade and the contract have not been “worth it” is to acknowledge Cleveland’s hollow premise that there’s a world in which they could have been. Trading for Watson was a franchise-altering error from the jump, one that, no matter what they try, may be impossible to recover from.
