Cleveland Browns QB Deshaun Watson has provided the rest of the NFL with an endless stream of entertainment. Unfortunately for them, it hasn’t been the sort of entertainment they anticipated but rather schadenfreude. Now out with a season-ending injury, his future with the team is a hot topic. While he has two more years of guaranteed salary, they don’t have to play him—or even roster him.
Browns GM Andrew Berry fielded a ton of questions about Watson yesterday, and he did his best to give elusive answers. As HC Kevin Stefanski previously did, he was unwilling to make a hard commitment to Watson being their starter again if he were fully healthy.
“Our focus organizationally is on making sure that [Watson] gets healthy”, Berry said. Asked if the decision about this future as a starter then was about health and not performance, he said. “No, I’d say this, again, our focus is on getting him healthy and we’ll go from there”.
As I talked about last time when Browns beat writers posed a similar question to Stefanski, this is not the sort of answer a team gives about a legitimate franchise quarterback. You would never get a “we’ll go from there” answer about Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen following a major injury. The Browns are not saying what everyone knows at this point what they’re thinking about Deshaun Watson.
While teams are generally cautious about what they will and won’t say, the Browns’ navigation of the Deshaun Watson issue still speaks volumes. Asked about his play, Berry deflected and pushed the issue to team-wide concerns. Most telling was his answer when asked to reflect on the trade itself.
“I’m really not in reflection mode”, he said when asked point blank if the Browns still believe it was wise to make the trade for Deshaun Watson. “I remember I got asked this about [Joshua] Dobbs last year. It’s not really my focus at this point in the year. Our focus is really on finishing out the 2024 season, having the team play at a higher level, and then we’ll get to those maybe longer-term or big-picture reflections at a later point in time”.
But the Deshaun Watson trade has nothing to do with the Joshua Dobbs move. Nor is it even close to the same stakes. The Browns gave up an enormous part of their future on the promise that Watson would replace those losses: $230 million over five years, guaranteed, and three first-round picks, plus additional picks. And they have a 9-10 record to show for it over three years. You simply don’t say, in the middle of the third year of a five-year contract, that you’re “not in reflection mode” when it comes to the acquisition of a franchise quarterback.
The best Andrew Berry could manage pertaining to the future of Deshaun Watson with the Cleveland Browns was acknowledging it was “always possible” there was some universe in which he started another game. That is hardly a ringing endorsement of the biggest investment in the history of the franchise.
