Whenever you find yourself locked in a preseason quarterback battle — as so often happens to all of us! — it’s usually advisable to play well and not blame the fans for “making it personal” if you struggle. If you do the opposite, you probably will find yourself holding a clipboard before long, watching somebody else take over the offense.
Well, that would be good advice under normal circumstances, for normal players on normal teams. But since the Cleveland Browns’ suckiness defies math and reason…
The Browns’ Suckiness Defies Math And Reason
The Cleveland Browns will soon embark on their 20th season since the city got a second chance at an NFL franchise. And in one very specific, very depressing way, the team is right back where it started. When we fire up our NFL Elo ratings for the new seas…
…their competition to decide a QB1 before Week 1 of the 2026 NFL season may as well also defy math and reason. That must be why the team announced Monday that Deshaun Watson will be starting over Shedeur Sanders when Cleveland begins its season in earnest against Jacksonville in a little under three weeks. Because when it comes to Watson, the Browns have now spent five years proving that sunk costs can always sink even further.
The latest episode in the Watson melodrama came as he was stinking up the joint in Cleveland’s 31-7 preseason loss to Buffalo on Saturday. After Sanders led a TD drive on the Browns’ first possession and finished the rest of the half, Watson came in and went 5-for-12 with 36 yards, 1 interception and a 14.6 passer rating — numbers that included this gem:
Despite the stands being half-full in Cleveland, boos rained down on Watson — he’s honestly lucky it wasn’t beer bottles instead — throughout the second half. Afterward, Watson complained about how Browns fans treat him:
“I think the whole world knows it has nothing to do about the performance,” Watson said. “It’s a little bit [more] personal than that. So I think it’s a disrespectful thing. […] I feel like I get more love in road games than I do home games. So if it is my spot ... maybe it’s 17 away games then. I don’t know.”
Watson did also mention that he felt the Cleveland crowd had cheered when he tore his Achilles tendon — which is obviously terrible form. But mostly, the boos have to do with the fact that the Browns’ move for Watson in March 2022 is arguably the most complete, unmitigated disaster of a trade in all of sports history.
As I noted here, the three components that make up Watson’s complete and utter failure — and that of the Browns’ brain trust under owner Jimmy Haslam III, then-Chief Strategy Officer Paul DePodesta, GM Andrew Berry and former coach Kevin Stefanski — are his dozens of sexual assault accusations, his massive guaranteed contract and his exceptionally poor play on the field.
The first item on the list is mostly beyond the scope of this little nerd-blog we operate here, except to say that it defies my own common sense to look at the sheer number of women who independently accused Watson of similar misconduct, and conclude that it all amounted to some giant coincidence or innocent misunderstanding. I’m not a court of law — though the NFL did fine and suspend Watson for (a paltry) 11 games under its personal-conduct policy — but I’m still allowed to look at the public record and form an opinion about what kind of person I think Watson is.
As for the next two items, they are inextricably connected in how much they add to the Watson disaster. Per Spotrac data, Watson’s total cumulative salary-cap hit from 2022-2025 was $92,395,992, which ranked 10th-most among NFL quarterbacks behind Dak Prescott, Patrick Mahomes, Matthew Stafford, Jared Goff, Kyler Murray, Lamar Jackson, Kirk Cousins, Joe Burrow and Josh Allen. For all that money, those other QBs all produced at least 250.0 Expected Points Added (EPA) over replacement, averaging 550.9 apiece over that span.
And then there’s Watson, who produced -6.5 EPA above replacement, sixth-worst among QBs with at least 500 pass attempts during that period. (Only Zach Wilson, Cam Ward, Will Levis, Cooper Rush and Davis Mills added less value among qualifiers.)
Watson was by far the NFL’s highest-paid sub-replacement level QB during those four seasons; the next-highest was Wilson at $22.5 million. And among QBs paid even half of Watson’s cap hits, the worst two QBs — Ryan Tannehill (76.9 EPA above replacement for $75.2M) and Russell Wilson (139.6 EPA above replacement for $51.2M) — were significantly more productive than Watson was:
Any way you slice it, Watson has been one of the NFL’s worst quarterbacks since joining the Browns — when he’s even been healthy enough to play at all; he has just 19 starts total (or 4.8 per year) in those four seasons — despite also being one of its most expensive. And that’s before we even include the cost in draft picks — the original trade was three first-rounders, plus three additional picks, for Watson and a sixth-rounder — that brought Watson to Cleveland from Houston in the first place.
Across all of sports history, it’s hard to think of a failure so comprehensive on so many different levels. And yet, the Browns continue to double/triple/etc down on the decision in what feels like one of the most textbook cases of the Sunk Cost Fallacy ever publicly put to the test. The more Watson has cost them, the more determined they seem to be to extract some kind of value out of him, no matter what it takes.
No, Sanders probably isn’t the Browns’ answer, either — he himself was one of the worst QBs in football last year, though he at least had the excuse of being an NFL rookie. And cutting Watson now would still incur a truly massive dead-cap penalty, so they are stuck with him on the roster one way or another. The Browns have had the worst production under center of any team in the league since returning from their “hiatus” in 1999, and nobody in that QB room was going to change that in 2026.
But all of that is almost beside the point. Cleveland has spent five years now gathering mountains of evidence that Watson is never going to be even a shadow of the great player he once was in Houston. At least Sanders represents something different, if not simply a symbolic turning of the page away from the biggest mistake in the history of a city literally called the “Mistake By The Lake”. Instead, the Browns are choosing to reopen the same chapter yet again, as if the ending might finally change this time.
Filed under: NFL
Well put man. What a mess in Cleveland.