Browns Down to Last Option to Make Deshaun Watson Trade Work

The Cleveland Browns may have thought they were getting the best of the NFL when they made the deal to acquire Deshaun Watson, but the QB may simply have been getting the best of them.

Cleveland was so desperate to land a quarterback that they agreed to pay Watson $230 million guaranteed over a five-year contract, which is now closing in on its midway point. Beyond the 11 games he missed in 2022 due to an NFL suspension the Browns knew to expect and the 11 games he sat out last season due to a shoulder injury they couldn’t have predicted, Watson has started just 18 games in Cleveland (9-9).

Head coach Kevin Stefanski continues to back Watson as the team’s best chance to win, but he hasn’t improved meaningfully in any real way since coming back to the game after a full year off in 2021 while he was still technically a member of the Houston Texans.

Dan Graziano of ESPN speculated on Wednesday, October 16, that is because Watson has no incentive to do so.

“The worst part is Watson has no obvious incentive to get any better,” Graziano wrote. “If you know you’re going to get paid $2.5 million a week no matter how you perform and you know you can’t lose your job no matter how you perform, how motivated can you be to do the necessary work to improve?”

That leaves only one solution for the Browns — they must bench Watson, and do so publicly, in a last-ditch effort to wake him up.

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Browns Have Waited Too Long to Do Something About Deshaun Watson

Ari Meirov of 33rd Team said earlier this month that there is zero chance the team will bench Watson in a public fashion, adding that if they did so it would be under the guise of something like an injury.

“It would have to be a locker room situation where the players revolt and are like, ‘We need somebody else out there,'” Meirov said on Wednesday, October 9. “I would be stunned if they ever come out and say [they] are benching Deshaun Watson. The wording is gonna be different. …  It’s gonna be an injury type of a thing. It will not be, ‘We are benching him.’ They are not gonna embarrass him like that, and they are not gonna embarrass the organization like that.”

But the organization has already embarrassed itself by making arguably the worst trade in NFL history when it sent the Texans three first-round picks and three more Day 2 selections across three drafts for a QB who hadn’t played in a year and was facing more than two dozen allegations of sexual misconduct — several of which ultimately included criminal complaints.

The Browns embarrassed themselves further by then signing Watson to probably the worst contract in league history based on how he has performed thus far (3,237 yards, 19 TDs and 12 INTs on 60.4% passing and .500 team record, most of the credit for belongs to the defense).

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Browns Must Bench Deshaun Watson if They Hope for Him to Ever Work Out in Cleveland

“Embarrassing” Watson by benching him publicly, as Meirov put it, might cause a few eyebrows to raise within the NFL Players Union and potentially dissuade a free agent here or there from coming to Cleveland because they believe the organization mishandled the QB’s situation. But there can’t be much abiding sympathy for Watson anywhere in the league at this point.

Showing the former three-time Pro Bowler (2018-20) that he needs to earn his spot by benching him may actually earn the Browns a modicum of respect from a player who has had no incentive to respect anything or be accountable in any way for his on-field or off-field behaviors since arriving in Cleveland two and a half years ago.

The Browns are 1-5 and on the verge of a lost season. They just traded Amari Cooper, their best wide receiver of the last three years, to the Buffalo Bills for a Day 2 draft pick. They signed former No. 1 overall pick Jameis Winston on a one-year deal to be the backup.

Watson is 31st in the league in QBR (21.7) and hasn’t thrown for more than 200 yards in a game this season. Cleveland is poised to draft in the top-three in 2025 (currently No. 2) and must take a QB there if things don’t improve, as doing so is the only way it can extricate itself from two more years of Watson’s apathetic mediocrity.

Cleveland must find out now if it can salvage anything within the QB. To do that, the team must motivate Watson. However, the circumstances the franchise has created mean there’s only one way to do that — by benching him.

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