The longest running joke in the NFL is the Cleveland Browns. And the Browns’ newest bit is their unwavering commitment to starting quarterback Deshaun Watson, who is, by every possible metric, one of the worst passers in the NFL. 

There are a lot of ugly (and expensive) reasons the Browns are sticking with Watson, and I think there’s now little doubt that Cleveland’s 2022 trade for him will go down as the worst NFL deal of all time—an abject failure in every sense.

But we’re going to talk about Watson the quarterback. The Browns are 1-5 and dead last in the AFC North after losing to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, 20-16. The Browns didn’t score an offensive touchdown in that game, and it took them about 55 minutes to even get into the red zone. Watson’s stat line wasn’t horrendous because he didn’t throw an interception, but box scores don’t account for how truly awful Watson was on Sunday and has been for the entirety of this season.

The Browns are averaging 240 yards per game, the lowest of any team in the NFL by 13 yards. They’ve scored 80 points on offense in six games, which ranks second lowest—ahead of only the putrid Miami Dolphins (who have played one fewer game and have started three different quarterbacks). Let’s not forget that we saw Joe Flacco throw for 250-plus yards in each of his six starts for the Browns last season while Watson was injured. Flacco threw multiple touchdowns in five games for Cleveland. Watson hasn’t thrown for more than 250 yards in a game since Week 3 of last season, and he’s thrown for multiple touchdowns just once in 2024. OK, I’m getting carried away with the honorable mention bad stats. 

It’s not just that Watson has been bad. It’s that he’s been one of the worst starting quarterbacks we’ve ever seen. 

Let’s get to the list of 12 worst stats that describe Watson’s historically horrendous start to this season:

12. Rodney McLeod Jr. Is the Offense

The Browns scored their only touchdown on Sunday when safety Rodney McLeod Jr. scooped up a blocked field goal and returned it 50 yards to the end zone. It was his second touchdown this season after he returned a fumble for a score in Week 4. 

Yes, Watson has contributed to as many touchdowns over the past three games as a 34-year-old veteran safety. That’s disgusting. 

11. Sack City

Watson has taken a league-high 31 sacks—11 more than any other quarterback. He’s been sacked on 13.5 percent of his dropbacks, which is tied for the 10th-highest rate for a quarterback in Weeks 1-6 since at least 2000. Now, it’s unfair to reference that stat and not mention Cleveland’s offensive line injuries. Both of the Browns’ starting offensive tackles, Jack Conklin and Jedrick Wills Jr., have missed significant time this season, and they’ve had injuries to backup tackles and interior linemen. That obviously hasn’t made life easy for Watson in the pocket. 

However, he has the fourth-highest pressure-to-sack ratio and the fifth-highest time to throw on all dropbacks, according to Pro Football Focus. Watson is a significant part of the problem. 

10. Terrible on Third Downs 

I couldn’t believe this stat from the Fox broadcast when it was spreading across Twitter like wildfire on Sunday. On the season thus far, Cleveland has converted on just 19 percent of its third-down attempts, the third-lowest percentage for any team in Weeks 1-6 since at least 2000. Abysmal. 

Watson’s dropback success rate on third downs this season is 24 percent, the lowest in the NFL entering Week 7. That is also the 11th-lowest success rate on third downs for any quarterback in Weeks 1-6 since at least 2000.

9. Nostalgic for Joe Flacco 

Not to keep bringing up Joe Flacco, but can you IMAGINE Joe Flacco in this Browns offense?!

8. Bad in a Basic Way

Let’s look at the most basic, important passing stat: net yards per attempt, which subtracts sack yards lost from passing yards and divides the difference by dropbacks. It’s essentially yards per attempt with sacks weighted in. 

Watson has the fifth-lowest net yards per attempt average (4.2) in Weeks 1-6 since 2000, placing him in the bottom 1 percent of all quarterbacks. (Notably, New England’s Jacoby Brissett is at 4.4 net yards per attempt this season—that’s better than Watson, and Brissett’s already been benched.) 

7. Can’t Buy a First Down

ESPN’s Bill Barnwell dropped this beauty of a stat on Sunday. 

I’ve never looked at first downs per pass attempt before this tweet, but it’s not surprising to see that Watson ranks dead last since 2007. A lot of this has to do with his inability to convert on third down (as I mentioned above), but this also speaks to just how inefficient Watson and the Browns have been on early downs. They’re averaging minus-0.26 expected points added per pass attempt on first and second downs, which, stop me if you’ve heard this before, ranks dead last in the league this season.

6. Veteran DVOA Is DOA 

We’ve never seen a quarterback with as much experience regress as much as Watson has since coming to Cleveland. And we’ve never seen a veteran QB play this badly, period. 

Yikes.

5. Not Just Bad, but Bad for the Browns

I first started tracking Watson’s abysmal stats last month, when I discovered that the 2024 Browns had the worst Cleveland offense in Weeks 1-3 since at least 2000, which is as far back as TruMedia’s database goes. The Browns have had arguably the worst quarterback situation of the millennium, and Watson was creating new lows for that franchise. 

And he still is! The Browns offense is averaging minus-1.3 EPA per drive, the lowest average for any Browns offense in Weeks 1-6 since at least 2000. It’s also the worst Browns offense this millennium by success rate and yards per play. Watson also ranks last in EPA per dropback and success rate among any Browns quarterback with 120-plus dropbacks in Weeks 1-6 since at least 2000. 

Timeout for a (Fabricated) Fan Question: What the hell is EPA and success rate? Why should I care about your woke stats? #DawgPound4Life

EPA absolutely is a hard stat to understand. Essentially, EPA doesn’t treat all plays the same, and it takes into account things like game situation, down and distance, and field position. It’s Nerd Stat of the Year (unofficial) three years running because it’s both comprehensive and stable.

Success rate, meanwhile, is just the percentage of plays on which an offense generates positive EPA. It’s a pass-fail test. It measures just what percentage of plays worked.

4. QBR Disaster

Watson is currently ranked last by ESPN’s QBR metric, which scales quarterback performance from 0 to 100, at 21.5. For comparison, he had a QBR of 43.7 last season before he was injured, and his career-high QBR was as a rookie in Houston, at 83.7. To put his 2024 QBR in context, he’s currently worse than Blaine Gabbert’s 22.2 in 2011 and is the worst since Carolina’s Jimmy Clausen posted a QBR of 13.8 in 2010.

3. Bad Company

The names tell you all you need to know here. These are the bottom 10 quarterback performances in Weeks 1-6 by EPA per dropback since 2000:

… Wait, is that Will Levis?!

2. Bad Company (Again)

These are the bottom eight quarterback performances in Weeks 1-6 by dropback success rate since at least 2000. You do not want to be in Josh Rosen or David Carr territory!

1. Worse Than JaMarcus Russell

I’m a nerd, surely you’ve learned that by now. I probably look at numbers too much. So trust me when I say it is really hard to find a stat in which anyone ranks worse than JaMarcus Russell’s 2009 season with the Oakland Raiders. That was Russell’s last year playing in the NFL. It’s the career-worst season for the NFL draft’s biggest bust. And, yes, Watson has managed to rank lower than even Russell in 2009. 

Through Weeks 1-6 this season, Watson has generated minus-66.2 EPA on dropbacks, beating Russell’s minus-62.8 EPA on dropbacks in Weeks 1-6 in 2009 for the record low this millennium.

Austin Gayle