The current Browns regime has already made some significant evaluations at the quarterback position, be it on the record about Carson Wentz or anonymously about Baker Mayfield. So it would be interesting to hear the team’s own internal audit on how it has handled the position since discarding Mayfield and signing Deshaun Watson, currently, roughly, the 18th-best quarterback in the NFL, to the most binding player contract in NFL history.
We’re not here to kick Watson while he is down. The Browns announced Wednesday he will miss the remainder of his second season in Cleveland to have shoulder surgery stemming from a “new discomfort” that arose during a hit sustained in the first half of a win over the Ravens. Indeed, there was not a down Sunday against Baltimore that did not end in some sort of pained grimace from the quarterback. This, after Watson missed time with a shoulder injury earlier in 2023. While I am not joining the chorus of folks who said that Watson’s performance against Baltimore was a watershed moment for him in Cleveland—he did, after all, throw a pick-six and complete just six of his first 20 passes—the second-half comeback included a handful of good throws.
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I’m talking about an inability of the organization to acknowledge, via its personnel strategy, the fact that Watson should have been better supported. Cleveland needed PJ Walker to take a snap in Sunday’s game and was probably one more Watson hit away from needing Walker for longer in a critical divisional matchup against the first-place Ravens. So far this season, Cleveland has asked Walker to throw 98 passes, and he has a completion percentage under 50%, with one touchdown and five interceptions. The team has also asked Dorian Thompson-Robinson, a rookie fifth-round pick, to throw 37 passes, and he has a completion percentage just barely over 50%, zero touchdowns and three interceptions.
The team also traded Joshua Dobbs and a seventh-round pick to the Cardinals for a fifth-round pick before the start of the season, which seems to be the culmination of some hubris or fear, or perhaps the former masquerading as the latter.
Dobbs has proved himself to be an invaluable asset, which the Cardinals gave away only because Kyler Murray was returning from injury and the team was desperate for draft capital. He is now the centerpiece of a Vikings surge that could end up with the once 1–4 team making the playoffs. While some statistical markers—a combination of EPA per play and completion percentage over expectation—suggest that Watson was playing better than Dobbs this year, Dobbs still has a higher down-to-down success rate, and it should be noted that, in Arizona, he did not have the level of talent surrounding him that Watson has in Cleveland.
But we’re not arguing about who is better between Dobbs and Watson; we’re arguing that Dobbs was certainly more valuable than the pick swap he was discarded for and that he should have been considered an essential piece of Cleveland’s strategy. He is clearly more valuable than a combination of Walker and Thompson-Robinson, especially for a team in playoff contention with one of the best defenses in the NFL.
Hindsight is always 20/20, right? (Even though I was pretty strong in my belief that the Browns should trade for a backup QB at the deadline.) How fair are we being to the Browns? Well, I feel like this was always going to be a personnel-related side effect to signing Watson: If the Browns had kept an armada of capable quarterbacks on the depth chart behind him, we’d wonder where the confidence stemmed from to pay Watson $230 million in the first place. The flip side to that, displaying a high degree of confidence in Watson, fails to acknowledge that Watson is playing in the toughest division in football, against one team (Pittsburgh) with one of the highest blitz rates in the NFL, and all three teams (Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cincinnati) with the highest percentage in the NFL of quarterback knockdowns (a statistic that tracks how many times the passer is whacked after, or while, getting rid of the football). Injuries were inevitable, especially given that Watson has a history of them and has played just three complete seasons in the NFL since being drafted in 2017.
Watson was missing games before the trade deadline, and the team did not see fit to either bring back Dobbs (he was traded along with a seventh-round pick to Minnesota for a 2024 sixth-round pick) or reacquire old friend Jacoby Brissett from the Commanders. Brissett is currently backing up Sam Howell. Washington, desperate for draft capital, traded two of its better pass rushers on expiring contracts. Clearly, they were open for business.
This failure to act, or to try to sit on both sides of the fence, will force the team to double down on Walker, or select from an available pool of free agents who are going to have to learn the playbook at warp speed. While Cleveland’s schedule is certainly navigable over the next few weeks, that cannot be the centerpiece of an argument making the case for not upgrading at the backup quarterback position.
Here is the truth: Be it rust, be it his current ability or some combination of the two, Watson did not play commensurate with what we would expect from a $230 million quarterback last season after his long hiatus from football, which included an 11-game suspension for accusations that he sexually harassed and assaulted more than 20 women. This year, Watson had two games in which he posted a quarterback rating above 100, in wins over the 2–8 Cardinals and the 3–6 Titans.
Even if there was a prevailing belief that Watson was finally turning the corner, it feels like the front office was more faithful to the ultimate development and confidence of Watson instead of the roster as a whole, which, let’s be honest, has won a majority of these seven games on the strength of a lights-out defense and an admirable running game sans Nick Chubb.
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Seven other thoughts
• If you’d like an example of a team that took an alternate route than Cleveland, let’s look at another team with a quarterback who played significantly below the level of his contract in 2022. New Broncos coach Sean Payton signed Jarrett Stidham almost immediately when free agency opened, despite praising Russell Wilson publicly in an effort to buoy his confidence. While Payton’s motives and machinations are far from flawless, this was a way to protect the team against the bottom falling out at the position.
• Cleveland is not alone. I think, because of the Brock Purdy effect, a lot of general managers and coaches became more confident in the power of schemes above established talent (even though that’s a bit of a complicated argument to begin with, and Purdy was painfully overlooked as a prospect). A few years back, when the Eagles reached the Super Bowl with Nick Foles, the backup quarterback was at a premium. I remember writing a piece for the magazine about the inherent value of Josh McCown, Drew Stanton, Chad Henne, Matt Hasselbeck and so on. However, the Jets opted to go into this season backing up a near-40-year-old Aaron Rodgers with a still-developing Zach Wilson. The Rams tried the same rookie understudy approach to backing up Matthew Stafford that Cleveland did.
In some places, this can be more forgivable. In Los Angeles, for example, Sean McVay has a track record of getting the most out of quarterbacks, and the Rams were also not widely considered a playoff team. The Browns and Jets, similarly, had Super Bowl aspirations, shifting the calculations dramatically.
• While there is a difference between real life and optics, what happens if Baker Mayfield makes the playoffs with the Buccaneers and latches on as a Geno Smith–like full-time starter? Since leaving the offensive personnel wasteland that is Carolina, Mayfield logged one of the signature wins of the 2022 season, a Dobbs-ian, just-off-the-plane victory over the Raiders for an injury-battered Rams team. Then, he won the starting job in Tampa Bay and could very well lead the Buccaneers to the playoffs. The Browns understood the massive swing that signing Watson was and, with that massive swing, the risk of being consistently lampooned along the way at best and subject to consistent vitriol at worst. Missing the postseason, and watching the person who formerly held that job make the postseason for a small fraction of the cost may be one of those stay-off-social-media days.
• While most of us are going to pile on, I would bet the tenor inside Cleveland’s facility is probably different, at least in terms of those who made the decision to pull the trigger on Watson. We can argue the legitimacy of those feelings, and I certainly would, but I would think the Browns remain all in on Watson. Due to the nature of his contract, they don’t have much of a choice, anyway. However, like the vig on a sketchy street loan, the pressure for Watson to succeed compounds somewhat violently in 2024. This was supposed to be the year Watson showed the world why he was worth a trove of draft picks, a fully guaranteed contract and, most notably, a chance to become a franchise quarterback amid very serious and troubling accusations. So far, in two seasons, Watson has an 81.7 QB rating, 14 touchdowns nine interceptions, and is passing for fewer than 190 yards per game. He has one game-winning drive so far. Short of Watson’s launching an MVP campaign in ’24 with a set of playmakers, an offensive line and a defense that will be one year older, the Browns will have an increasingly difficult time selling an idea that lopped off a portion of its fan base and soured the team’s reputation both inside and outside the NFL. How strange a twist, too, that Cleveland will be projecting success after Watson’s shoulder recovery, when it felt that Mayfield did not warrant the same projection.
• It remains to be seen whether Watson’s injury will impact the AFC playoff picture. Currently, the Browns would be in the postseason, with the Bengals sitting just behind Cleveland’s heels. Cleveland was winning games with suboptimal quarterback play throughout the year and may continue to do so. It’s impossible to guarantee that the Watson we saw versus the Titans for one game and the Ravens for one half would exist in perpetuity through the remainder of the season (though if that were possible, Cleveland would be considered a favorite to win the division). But, I think the Bengals were always going to surge, and the Steelers were, at some point, going to have to confront the high-wire nature by which they win games. The AFC North has a lot of jostling left.
• What will happen to Kevin Stefanski? Cleveland’s coach is now in the fourth year of a five-year contract. This is almost always the time when a coach commands an extension. Rarely do we see coaches trotted out as potential lame ducks without security beyond the current season, which would be the position Stefanski finds himself in next year. Owner Jimmy Haslam, back in March, said that discussions of an extension were “premature” at the time. Stefanski became tied to Watson’s hip the moment the Browns made the signing. We are now unable to gauge how much true progress Watson has made at the position. We still do not have a full season’s sample size worth of data. Cleveland will have to bet big on Stefanski going into 2024, or the team will have to forcibly consider what is best for Watson long term. While it doesn’t seem like a huge problem—Stefanski helped lead the franchise out of obscurity before Watson’s arrival, after all—Haslam is in a delicate position.
• Speaking of optics and evaluations, I am genuinely curious as to how the Browns would have rated the 2022 and ’23 quarterback classes. The ’22 class was a hard pass for almost everyone, but had Cleveland not dropped all of its capital into Watson, it could have had a shot at either Bryce Young (the Bears were open for business on the No. 1 pick), C.J. Stroud, Anthony Richardson or Will Levis, all of whom have shown some promise without the side effects. Stroud is helping the Texans completely and wholly pivot away from the Watson era, and is currently in the MVP conversation. Had the Browns, for example, signed Mayfield to a kind of Daniel Jones–ian, two-years-and-then-we’ll-see deal, the ’23 draft would have been a kind of pivot point for the franchise. It shows the breadth of what Cleveland has risked to this point and certainly underlines what we had noted about expectations for ’24. Should the Browns miss the playoffs in ’23 with one of the best rosters in the NFL, we will then be talking about the sacrificing of two seasons for the hopeful betterment of others down the road.
