In the second quarter of Sunday’s Cleveland Browns–Washington Commanders game, Jayden Daniels took a critical fourth-down snap just inside midfield in a one-score game. He dropped seven steps from the shotgun, taking him 10 total yards from the first-down marker, and turned to see Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah screaming toward him, totally unblocked.
Owusu-Koramoah is one of the fastest hybrid defensive players in the NFL and an excellent open-field tackler, but with a shake of Daniels’s hips, the Browns’ linebacker went airborne and sideways, looking a bit like a kid ejected from one of those metal playground carousels. Daniels picked up the first down and kept going, advancing nearly 34 yards past the marker on a play that, one could argue, rendered the already lifeless Browns out of striking distance.
This was, generously, a 5.5 out of 10 on the ever-expanding Daniels Scale of Excellence, which not only has him on a crash course with the Offensive Rookie of the Year award but also the league’s MVP award. When the game was 0–0, Daniels was hit with six-man pressure on third-and-13 (a down-and-distance combination that seems punt-worthy for more than half of the teams in the NFL). The running back in protection was blasted by a blitzing defender and a small horde of bodies nearly collapsed on Daniels. He hopped out of a struggle, scrambled and lofted an absolutely gorgeous pass to Terry McLaurin to set the Commanders up goal to go (perhaps the one play Daniels wanted back occurred shortly after when he threw a pick to Owusu-Koramoah).
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Compare that to Deshaun Watson, who, in the face of relentless pressure, was sacked seven times Sunday in the Browns’ 34–13 loss to the Commanders. At times, there were open outlet receivers. At other times, there was a befuddling lack of properly aligned backfield protection, leaving entire sides of Cleveland’s banged-up offensive line without help and exposed. And at other times, Watson was simply swallowed whole like a lone surfer ahead of a tidal wave. But in nearly every circumstance, the Browns’ franchise quarterback seemed to accept getting wrestled to the ground as a kind of inevitability.
He remains a quarterback who plays like a passer interested in and willing to extend plays. Heading into Sunday Night Football, only two quarterbacks in Week 5 held onto the ball longer than Watson on Sunday, who averaged more than 3.2 seconds per drop-back.
The juxtaposition was, I assume, not lost on the Browns and I wonder if seeing Daniels up close was a reminder of everything they thought they were getting from Watson when they signed him to a fully guaranteed, five-year, $230 million contract.
While Watson’s remaining supporters will, I assume, point out that he had one of these explosive, Daniels-like plays last week against the Las Vegas Raiders—though it was called back due to a phantom hold—and that the offensive line was punished Sunday even without Watson in the game (this look at a failed fourth-down conversion kind of proves the point), and that his struggles have been wrapped up in a grape leaf of false starts, other procedural penalties and wide receiver drops, the narrative was unavoidable at the tail end of another lost game. Here was a broadcast booth sandwiching shots of a genial, laughing Daniels next to Watson and Jameis Winston, discussing the supplanting of Watson as a starter like some sort of inevitability. Cleveland’s offense, in terms of yards per play, is the worst of any offense through five weeks since 2018.
Watson and the Browns have suffered at the hands of the countless, nonstop, week-by-week statistical comparisons to the guy who had the job before Watson, Baker Mayfield. I would assume the Daniels comparison is even more painful given that Daniels plays, evades, elevates (go back to a near Zach Ertz fumble in this game, where Daniels seems to help calm a veteran 10 years his senior, then feed him the ball on the next play in a move that, I assume, was meant to help Ertz get back into the flow of a game) and conjures magic in the exact way the Browns hoped Watson would. Hence, why the Browns paid him so much money and guaranteed his contract.
Daniels is playing spectacularly but what the Commanders did with Daniels is not all that spectacular. They put him on a roster of capable players and paired him with an offensive coordinator (Kliff Kingsbury) who called plays that accentuated his strengths. They allowed Daniels to be Daniels. They are also paying him $35 million less per season and have a player they can regularly market, celebrate and imagine a long-term future.
I would guess that, even though Cleveland’s historic difficulties with finding a quarterback are well known, this organization could eventually have landed someone like Daniels through the draft and aligned the right group of coaches and surrounding personnel. The year after the Browns signed Watson, C.J. Stroud was selected second by the same Texans that inherited a haul of picks from Cleveland for the pleasure of signing Watson. Daniels, Caleb Williams and Drake Maye were drafted the year after that (never mind Bo Nix, J.J. McCarthy and Michael Penix Jr.). The Chicago Bears, Houston Texans and the Commanders have had a history at the quarterback position that, while not given the same narrative weight as Cleveland’s struggles, have been nearly as cringeworthy. Each team continued to take punches, build the roster, and set the runway for something sustainable and fun.
In that way, it’s less about the apples-to-apples comparison—what Cleveland gave up versus what they currently have. It’s what doors would have opened to them if they’d never entered the Watson sweepstakes. What possibilities. What deferred luck. What we saw out of Daniels on Sunday and what currently exists under center in Cleveland.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jayden Daniels Is Everything the Browns Hoped Deshaun Watson Would Be.
