There is the football price and the moral price the Cleveland Browns paid for Deshaun Watson.
In 2022, Watson didn’t seem worthy of either.
Focusing on football alone, Watson is perhaps the most difficult player to evaluate in the NFL heading into the 2023 season. Will the Browns get the dynamo who never looked anything less than spectacular for Clemson and the Houston Texans, the type of player the franchise decided was worth selling its soul for? Or will they get the skittish, turnover-prone player who was one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL during his six-game stint down the stretch of Cleveland’s 2022 season?
The contrasts between Houston Watson and Cleveland Watson are stark. As a rookie in 2017, Watson threw for 19 touchdowns in 6.5 games. In six games last year, Watson threw for just seven touchdowns. In 2020, Watson led the NFL in yards per attempt; last year, he was 33rd in yards per attempt out of 39 quarterbacks with at least 150 throws. According to Pro Football Focus, Watson went from being in the 95th percentile on early downs in 2020 to the worst QB in the league on those downs in 2022. The Browns offense actually looked better with Jacoby Brissett, the journeyman backup who filled in during Watson’s suspension—they scored more points per game and averaged more yards per play with their rent-a-QB than with their new franchise star.
Watson seemed unconfident. He was constantly bailing from clean pockets behind the Browns’ top-tier offensive line. PFF credited 33.9 percent of QB pressures on Watson to Watson’s own poor decision-making, tied for the highest mark of any starting QB in the league. Watson also seemed afraid to throw deep balls, going just 3-for-13 with two interceptions on passes longer than 20 yards. His average depth of target dropped from 9.4 yards in 2020 to 7.9 yards in Cleveland—and yet, his completion percentage also dropped and his interception rate went up. Despite taking fewer risks, he completed fewer passes and committed more turnovers. (That’s bad.)
Oddly, that Watson simply lacked confidence last year would be the best possible scenario for Cleveland. Watson is 27, which means he should be in the prime of his career, and he didn’t suffer any injuries during his year and a half away from the field, after he was in essence benched by the Texans in 2021 and suspended for 11 games last year. It seems entirely possible to attribute Watson’s suddenly iffy pocket presence and hesitance to throw the ball downfield to mental rustiness after spending 18 months out of the huddle. And mental issues can be fixable. Or, you know, they could be unfixable.
As a result, nobody is quite sure where to rate Watson. In The Athletic’s annual Quarterback Tiers ranking, Watson was the only player receiving votes in both Tier 1 (“the team wins because of him”) and Tier 4 (“a veteran who ideally would not start all 17 games”). Watson didn’t crack the NFL Network’s annual list of the league’s top 100 players, a ranking that’s the result of player votes, and a group of coaches and scouts polled by ESPN left Watson out of the league’s top 10 quarterbacks, with an anonymous QB coach telling ESPN, “Keeping him out of the top 10 feels wrong. … But putting him in the top 10 also feels wrong based on the play last year.” Pro Football Focus slotted Watson in at 13th out of the league’s 32 starters, writing, “I have no earthly idea how good Watson will be in 2023, and neither does anybody else.”
It seems like the people making these lists are hedging their bets—nobody wants to put Watson in the top five, where he belonged during his Texans tenure, and nobody wants to put him 27th, where he should’ve been last year. But even in the unlikely scenario that Watson is a midtier quarterback—which he never has been before—the Browns are in deep trouble. They are not paying Watson to be average. They traded away three first-round picks to get him and will pay him an average of $46 million per year through 2026. The Watson contract isn’t just the largest fully guaranteed deal in the NFL—it remains the largest deal even after Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, and Jalen Hurts signed extensions this offseason. Much has been made of the earth-salting hole the Broncos have dug themselves by signing the fading Russell Wilson to a massive deal—and yet Wilson’s contract has less guaranteed money than Watson’s and the Broncos could get out of their bad deal sooner than Cleveland can. The Browns have devoted too many resources to Watson for him to be anything short of elite.
The football price for adding Watson was high, but the moral price remains incalculable. I imagine that somewhere in the Cleveland franchise headquarters in 2022, Browns decision-makers debated them both: What level of quarterback play could justify trading away three first-round picks for Watson and then signing him to the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history? And what level of quarterback play would justify standing by Watson after 24 women sued him, describing a pattern of sexual misconduct during massage appointments? No team would continue to employ a backup linebacker if two dozen women lined up to say he committed heinous acts. So exactly how good at football does someone like that have to be to convince a team to make him the face of its franchise? Is there a playoff-wins-to-lawsuits ratio that would make everybody happy? By bringing on Watson last year, the Browns decided to find answers to these questions that no serious person should ask.
Watson’s punishment for all of those accounts, laid out in two dozen lawsuits, was relatively short thanks to a loophole that has since been closed. Last summer, retired judge Sue L. Robinson, who served as an arbiter in Watson’s case, in her ruling described Watson’s behavior as a “pattern of conduct” that was “more egregious than any before reviewed by the NFL.” Robinson agreed with the NFL investigators who argued that Watson likely did commit sexual assault in a number of cases. (Watson has not faced criminal punishment, as the criminal justice system requires a higher burden of proof than an NFL investigation. He has settled 23 lawsuits; one remains active.) However, Robinson was able to issue only a six-game suspension, citing labor law and the limitations of the NFL’s personal conduct policy—the NFL hadn’t previously suspended any players for an entire season based on off-field sexual misconduct, so she couldn’t. The NFL appealed and the league and Watson eventually settled on an 11-game suspension. According to The New York Times, the NFL recently altered its personal conduct policy to ensure that players who display a pattern of deviance like Watson did will get harsher suspensions.
The Browns have basically pretended that all of this troubling off-field behavior did not happen, and are hoping you have forgotten about it, too. Watson’s stance remains that he did nothing wrong—he recently blamed the media for the narrative that he did bad things. The Browns have stood by him in every possible way, with team owner Jimmy Haslam publicly endorsing Watson’s character, and they seem to be hoping that by now their fans and the league at large have moved on.
I suspect that the Browns thought the high moral price of adding Watson helped lower the football price, even though they still wound up paying a premium to acquire him. A player of Watson’s caliber is essentially never available for football reasons alone. The Browns were able to trade for him in part because he was so toxic, and they were willing to outbid other teams who were willing to take that moral gamble. To the Browns, a franchise that has been defined by its long list of subpar quarterbacks, it was a risk worth taking.
In 2023, we will see whether that risk will pay off on the field—or whether it will prove to be one of the worst decisions any NFL team has ever made. It’s possible Watson can recapture his early-career glory. At his best, he was a one-man team, a dynamic combination of all the best things a quarterback can be. I’ve seen him make magic from crumbling pockets. I’ve seen him shake off bone-crunching hits to win championships. Not so long ago, I begged my Jets to trade for him. It’s still stranger to imagine him flailing than thriving on a football field.
But if Watson plays like he did last year, the Browns’ pragmatic gamble will turn into a franchise killer. The football price is massive, and will leave the Browns in a huge hole for years—and they’ll never pay off the moral price. They thought they were the cold-blooded realists of the NFL, setting themselves up to win in a league too naive to acknowledge that a bad guy could be a good QB. Instead, they might be stuck paying a quarter of a billion dollars to a guy who won’t even win them games. They were willing to sell their souls to win a Super Bowl. What happens if they sold their souls to finish third in the AFC North?
