Since returning from their post-relocation hiatus in 1999, the Browns have seen too many sad quarterback battles to count—but none creating the drama quite like what came to a head in Cleveland on Saturday.
The Browns started Shedeur Sanders against the Bills, and he was decent if not spectacular—going 9-for-11 for 74 passing yards with a touchdown and an interception. Then, Deshaun Watson relieved him. Amid a torrent of boos from his own fans, Watson struggled to five completions on 12 attempts for 36 yards and an interception.
This would be much less of a problem if Cleveland had not been overtly grooming Watson—who has not played a regular-season down since 2024—to start its opener against the Jaguars on Sept. 13. But it has, and now coach Todd Monken has a decision to make.
What remains amazing about the Browns’ phenomenally misguided Watson experiment—an experiment now entering year five—is how much Cleveland’s owners, the Haslams, continue to escape blame at the national level. Their names cannot be separated from the Watson debacle, a fact that has become more apparent as similarly invincible general manager Andrew Berry has drafted better and better in recent years. Hell, attaching themselves to Watson’s failures may be in the Haslams’ interest—better to distract from their Clay Davis-esque scheme to build a new stadium with Ohioans’ unclaimed government funds.
In the spring of 2022, Browns fans were readier than ever to embrace a winner at the quarterback position. Baker Mayfield, long considered Cleveland’s answer there, badly regressed in 2021 amid a series of injuries. After the Rams rolled the dice on a quarterback upgrade and won the Super Bowl that year, an upgrade beckoned.
What the Browns did instead was hand one of the largest contracts in the history of football to a quarterback who faced north of 20 allegations of sexual misconduct and had not taken the field since 2020, alienating the bulk of the football world and a substantial element within Cleveland as well. In a sense, even as Watson served an 11-game suspension in ’22, the trade represented the NFL’s formal entry into the post-accountability 2020s.
It would have been wrong had it succeeded, and yet Watson’s on-field performance—and sheer bad luck—made it worse than anyone could have possibly imagined. In ’22, Watson threw seven touchdowns against five interceptions in six games. In 2023, he again played only six games, and the Browns largely cobbled together their inspiring playoff run without him. In 2024, he played seven games before tearing his Achilles—an injury some Cleveland fans cheered, underlining the unpleasantness of the entire saga.
Oh, and did we mention that the Texans used the draft capital they wrested from the Browns to help construct a potential Super Bowl contender?
The bottom line is that Watson’s continued presence in Cleveland is serving no one—not the Browns writ large, clearly not Watson (the football player nor the person), not Sanders (who needs to start the bulk of this year, so Cleveland can see what it has before a quarterback-heavy 2027 draft), not Dillon Gabriel (still around!), not the Browns’ legitimately intriguing skill-position players, not what should be a good defense. Certainly not the NFL, which should know by now there’s such a thing as too little accountability.
In short: what a mess. Even more so than usual, it did not have to be this way for one of sports’ most forlorn franchises.
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