The Browns Need a New Quarterback

Replacing Deshaun Watson should be Cleveland's top offseason priority

Two years ago this month, the Cleveland Browns were supposed to have solved their quarterback problem. For as long as I can remember, the Browns have been infamous for the revolving door of mediocrity they have featured under center — how many teams could inspire multiple fan-altered jerseys commemorating the long lists of franchise busts?

Enter Deshaun Watson. In 2022, the Browns traded three first-round picks for Watson and signed him to a $230 million contract. When last Watson had played, in 2020, he was one of the most-dynamic quarterbacks in the league. Josh Allen and Aaron Rodgers were the only players in the NFL to rate higher than Watson in both Completion Percentage Over Expected (CPOE) and Expected Points Added per Play (EPA), two of the most-popular modern metrics for evaluating quarterbacks — pretty good company for a 25-year-old on a 4-12 team.

The quarterback position should have been settled from then until at least the end of Watson’s mega-contract in 2026. Yet as the 2024 NFL transaction period opens this week, it should be clear to the Browns’ front office that Watson was, and is, not the answer. He is no longer the elite quarterback that he once was. And he has been in decline too long to expect that he will rebound to his former level of play.

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The 2023 season went pretty well for the Browns. They made the playoffs. They rebounded from a disastrous start to the season. They embarked on a run that made Cleveland football feel fun, a rarity in my lifetime. And Deshaun Watson had very little to do with it.

Watson started just six games last year, as a nagging shoulder injury kept him out for most of October and ended his season after Week 10. He was legitimately impressive at the end of his final outing, completing 14 straight second-half passes in a comeback win over the eventual No. 1 seed Baltimore Ravens. But his overall numbers were comfortably mediocre. Of the 39 quarterbacks who attempted at least as many passes as Watson last year, he finished seventh-lowest in completion percentage and sixth-lowest in passing success rate. He ranked in the worst tercile for passer rating, sacks per attempt, and every permutation of yards per attempt I can find. Note that all these metrics are rates, not counting stats, so Watson’s numbers are not artificially deflated by his limited playing time. The problem was not merely that he was hurt, but that even when he was on the field he was not very good.

Or ignore the numbers and look at what happened after Watson was shut down for the year, when the Browns brought in Joe Flacco — who had been sitting at home because the league thought him washed up — to play quarterback for the stretch run. It is telling that an embodiment of what the league considered a replacement-level player performed roughly as well as Watson had. In fact the offense looked better with Flacco, whose signature confidence in his arm fit Kevin Stefanski’s aggressive playcalling scheme in a way that Watson’s tentativeness does not.

The problem is not just how Watson played last year. He was similarly mediocre, and arguably worse, in 2022. Of the 40 quarterbacks with at least as many snaps as Watson over the last two seasons, only two have fared worse than Watson in both CPOE and EPA: Davis Mills and Zack Wilson. That’s hardly the company he would have been compared to in his heyday.

Watson was not good in 2023. He was not good in 2022. He did not play in 2021, the year before the Browns acquired him. All of which is to say that Watson has not performed at even a league-average level since the Trump administration.

When the Browns moved on from Baker Mayfield after 2021, they claimed they needed a star QB to turn their roster from a contender to a champion. Yet for the last three seasons, Watson has looked like more than a meager game-manager for just one half of one game, and has often failed to reach even that uninspiring standard. Even if a guy who has missed 40 of his teams’ last 52 games is fully healthy by the start of next year, the belief that Watson will be even an decent quarterback going forward (let alone the kind of superlative talent that the Browns’ brass have said they need) is predicated on four-year-old observations that any reasonable analyst would recognize are out of date.

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There’s another major part of the Deshaun Watson saga that I have not mentioned yet. Over the last few years, Watson has faced disturbing allegations from at least 30 different women, ranging from sexual harassment to assault. I believe such actions should be disqualifying for an NFL player, let alone one who has been belligerently unrepentant and whose position and contract have effectively made him the face of the franchise. Unfortunately the Browns disagree — they traded for him in the midst of the league’s investigation, knowing a lengthy suspension was coming — as do a critical mass of fans and writers.

At the time of the Watson trade, defenders of the deal insisted that his play on the field was all that really mattered. This was always a specious argument, as building the team around Watson meant punting what should have been a championship-run season while he was suspended and banking on the rest of the roster staying healthy as the contention window was pushed back, though at least then it was plausible to expect him to perform at his 2020 level. To view the Watson trade now as anything but a colossal mistake implies the opposite perspective: To be so dug in on cognitive dissonance or reflexive own-the-libs empathy for a serial sex pest that you cannot acknowledge that he is no longer a good player, or even an average one.

I don’t have a specific quarterback in mind whom I want the Browns to acquire when the transaction period opens this week. I’m not smart enough to know which of the available trade candidates would fit well in Stefanski’s system. Nor am I stupid enough to claim good insight into this year’s class of eligible college signal-callers — not that Cleveland would be likely to land one of the top prospects, as they lost their 2024 first-round pick among the misguided king’s ransom they gave up in the Watson trade. A reunion with Joe Flacco would be fun, though he probably isn’t a championship-caliber starter either.

The Browns may not overcome the inertia of the sunk-cost fallacy — I’m not sure the team brass would admit to themselves that the Watson trade was a mistake, and the success they had with Flacco distracted from the question of why they had to bank the season on a 38-year-old has-been in the first place. Nor do I have faith in the same front office who acquired Watson to identify his successor, which is why it’s maddening that a franchise infamous for internal instability has somehow retained the leadership who made one of the worst trades in professional sports history. But with trade season and free agency starting up and the draft on the horizon, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the Browns’ top priority must be finding a better quarterback than Watson.