-
Bill Barnwell, ESPN Staff Writer
It’s time. At 1-5, with their season on life support, the Browns need to bench Deshaun Watson. The near-one quarter of a billion dollars Cleveland committed to pay him when it traded three first-round picks to acquire the former Texans quarterback in 2022 is a sunk cost. Continuing to play him both jeopardizes the credibility of the coaching staff to the franchise’s fans and players and extinguishes any hope of the Browns turning things around in 2024.
Sunday’s loss to the Eagles wasn’t Watson’s worst performance of the season, but there haven’t been any meaningful signs of growth. Facing a Philadelphia defense that ranked 27th in expected points added (EPA) per play heading into the game, Watson turned 28 pass dropbacks into just 144 yards. He was sacked five times. The Browns failed to score an offensive touchdown and only made their way into the red zone for the first time on their eighth and final drive of the game.
Subscribe: ‘The Bill Barnwell Show’
Browns coach Kevin Stefanski came out after the game Sunday and reiterated that the team isn’t making a change at quarterback. It’s impossible to know whether that decision is Stefanski’s or a mandate from the ownership group still on the hook for more than $93 million in remaining guaranteed money on Watson’s deal. For the purposes of the on-field product, though, it doesn’t matter. The Browns might not be a very good team with Jameis Winston at quarterback, but their offense likely would at least vaguely concern opposing defenses on a week-to-week basis.
How bad is Watson playing? What, specifically, has gone wrong? What does it look like on tape? How much responsibility does the three-time Pro Bowler bear? And what happens if the Browns eventually decide to make a change? Let’s get started by considering the last six weeks of football. Frankly, the bar for jaw-dropping Watson stats is high. This is a historically bad level of play to begin a season. I’ll work up to it by starting with the offense as a whole:
Jump to a section:
How bad has Watson been to start the season?
All the ways in which the QB is broken
How the rest of the offense is impacted
What the 2023 season showed about Watson
What the Browns should do now
How bad is the Browns’ offense?
It ranks 31st in EPA per play, ahead of only the Dolphins, who have been without starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa for most of the season. It is 31st in points per drive and averages a league-worst 19.5 yards per possession. The only thing the Browns do marginally well as a team is avoid turnovers, something that continued against the Eagles. The downside is they instead punt on nearly 51% of their possessions, the highest rate of any team.
Sunday’s lone trip inside the 20-yard line gave them just their ninth red zone trip of the season. Again, that’s a league low. Only six teams have managed fewer red zone possessions through six games since the 2000 season, leaving Cleveland tied for tied for 784th out of 798 possible teams. Four of those teams had their quarterbacks get injured or benched during that rough start. The exceptions were the 2008 Rams and 2009 Raiders, the latter of whom started JaMarcus Russell for most of the campaign.
A viral stat went around Sunday afternoon, and while it wasn’t entirely true, it wasn’t far off. At one point during the loss, the Browns had converted just one of their prior 27 third-down attempts, including an 0-for-7 run to start the game Sunday. (The stat suggested Cleveland had an 0-for-25 streak on third downs going at halftime of the Eagles game, but it didn’t include a third-and-2 late in the Commanders game in which the Browns ran for four yards and Washington jumped offsides.)
In all, the Browns have converted 19.2% of their third downs this season. The only other offense since the turn of the century to be less effective through six games on third downs was the 2010 Bears, who somehow managed to go 4-2 during that stretch by forcing 14 takeaways on defense. That run was mostly authored by Jay Cutler, but it included six quarters from Todd Collins, who went 10-of-27 for 68 yards with five interceptions. Watson hasn’t been quite that bad, but still: The Browns are 797th out of 798 possible teams at moving the chains on third downs through six games.
What about Watson?
To start, he ranks last in the league in Total QBR (21.5). The only player within 15 points of Watson is Will Levis (28.3). QBR has existed since 2007, and among passers who threw 100 pass attempts or more across their team’s first six games, Watson’s season ranks 558th out of 566.
Again, the only quarterback who ranked below Watson who also wasn’t injured, benched or coming off the bench to take over for another passer during that six-game start to their season was Russell. And, like Watson, there’s a strong case Russell was playing more because Raiders ownership was invested in the idea of its starting quarterback being good than any actual recent evidence.
Total QBR is just one stat. What about EPA? Well, The Ringer’s Austin Gayle helps there: Watson ranks last in cumulative EPA on dropbacks through the first six weeks of any season since 2000.
Going back to those 566 quarterbacks with at least 100 pass attempts, Watson ranks at or near the bottom of the league in virtually every rate metric. Among them, he is 565th in yards per attempt (5.1), 565th in yards per dropback (3.9) and 566th in first down rate (22.1%, just behind Bo Nix‘s 22.2%). Watson is better by passer rating because it doesn’t include one major flaw in his game.
Let’s get to that, actually, to help make the case Watson is off to a historical outlier of a dismal start to his season. What does this actually look like on tape? Where is he really struggling? And how much of that is on him versus the rest of the Cleveland offense?
How and where Watson is broken
Taking sacks. The problems for the Browns start with Watson’s propensity for being taken down. He is being sacked on a league-high 12.4% of his dropbacks this season, which is nearly double the average rate of 6.7% and the highest rate of any starter. He has always taken sacks more often than most quarterbacks as a product of his style, but his career sack rate before 2024 was 9.1%. Cumulatively, he has been sacked 31 times and nobody else has been taken down more than 20 times.
Those sacks are drive killers for most teams. Teams on the whole suffer dramatically when their quarterback gets sacked. The average drive without a sack in 2024 averages 2.2 points per possession. Add at least one sack to the mix and that drops in half to 1.1 points per drive. Obviously, there’s some selection bias there, as teams are more likely to be sacked in third-and-long situations, but being able to avoid negative yardage goes a long way in sustaining drives and scoring.
Watson has been sacked at least once on 27 different drives this season. The Patriots, who kept Drake Maye on the bench for five weeks out of the fear he would be immediately injured by playing, are second. They have 19 drives with at least one sack. The Browns unsurprisingly lead the league in percentage of drives with at least one sack as well, with more than 40% of their possessions resulting in at least one takedown.
Sacks aren’t the only problem — the Browns also rank last in points per drive when they don’t take a sack during a possession — but they destroy drives and create all those failed third downs. The average Cleveland third down this season has come with a whopping 9.2 yards to go, basically rendering its work on first and second down a waste of time. The Browns rank 574th out of 576 teams through 2007 in average yards to go on third down.
Is all of that on Watson? Of course not. They have been battered by injuries to their offensive line. Jedrick Wills Jr. and Jack Conklin, the team’s two starting tackles, have missed most of the season. Guard Wyatt Teller is on injured reserve. Tackle Dawand Jones, a revelation last year filling in for Conklin at right tackle, has looked like a totally different player in the wrong way. Eight different linemen have played at least 50 snaps for the Browns this season. And they’re doing this without legendary offensive line coach Bill Callahan, who departed to join the Titans in the offseason.
Quarterback sacks are relatively sticky from year to year even as teams change schemes and offensive linemen, which suggests they’re a product of the quarterback as opposed to what’s around him. Every team will have a moment in which they spring a leak in protection or have to go up against a superstar edge rusher, but passers play a big role in determining how often they’re sacked.
And watching those sacks back on tape, a fair number are on Watson. He has been sacked in situations in which a signal-caller absolutely cannot take one, like a fourth down play against the Cowboys when he was rolling out and didn’t get rid of the football. He has taken sacks in quick game when he was staring at open receivers and in a spot in which he’s supposed to get rid of the football. He was sacked Sunday when he held the ball on a screen. He has taken sacks on plays in which there was a clear lane to step up through the pocket and instead tried to escape out the side. He has taken sacks in which he was hot off one side and responsible for getting the ball out before the pass rush got home.
I’d estimate at least 10 of those sacks have more to do with Watson than everything else around him, and that’s a conservative estimate that assigns the blame for murkier plays to somebody else. That’s just not sustainable unless a quarterback is also simultaneously producing big plays. And because he’s getting sacked so often, his internal clock has been inconsistent; there are times in which he’s too aggressive to take the checkdown because he has been hit so often.
NFL Next Gen Stats has a measure called “quick quarterback pressures,” which gauges how often a QB is put into duress before he can get into rhythm. Watson’s quick pressure rate is 16.8%, which is above league-average but still only the league’s 10th-highest rate. His typical sack comes after an average of 4.6 seconds, which is right at league average. The line has not been good, but he’s undoubtedly playing a meaningful role in the Browns enduring too many sacks. Just moving to a quarterback with a league-average career sack rate, like Winston, would likely be enough to improve the Cleveland offense by keeping it out of third-and-forevers.
A lack of explosive plays. Quarterbacks can make up for high sack rates by producing big plays. Watson with the Texans was a great example; while he was running high sack rates throughout his time in Houston (2017-20), he averaged 12.3 yards per completion, the fourth-highest rate for any passer over that four-year span. The only player with a better QBR on deep throws over that stretch was Patrick Mahomes.
That version of Watson hasn’t shown up in 2024. He’s just 3-of-17 for 77 yards on deep passes. The only starter with fewer deep completions is Jacoby Brissett. Watson is both not attempting big throws and struggling when he does try them. He ranks last in the NFL in first-down rate (17.7%) and yards per attempt (4.5) on those deep passes. He has been hit on more than 50% of those pass attempts, and even some of the successes are ugly; he stared down an open Jerry Jeudy on a dig, didn’t throw the football when the window was open, scrambled to the other side of the field and then took a hit while eventually finding Jeudy for a first down.
An inability to fire passes on target. While Watson was unlucky to have Amari Cooper drop a touchdown pass on a deep throw, many of these passes simply haven’t been close. Eleven of those 17 deep throws have been considered off-target attempts by ESPN’s tracking, the second-highest rate for anybody, behind Bears rookie Caleb Williams. Some throws haven’t been close. Watson has put passes that are clearly designed to be catchable yards out of bounds without pass pressure, something NFL quarterbacks rarely do:
This is a first-and-10 play-action shot to Jeudy. It’s not a high-percentage pass, but it has to be in a place where the receiver can make a play on the football. Watson throws this ball *yards* out of bounds. pic.twitter.com/FMzBsNVjO3
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) September 9, 2024
Over the past two weeks, Watson has been lucky to get away with a pair of would-be interceptions on deep throws that met the same fate. They were only saved because two defenders had a potential play on the football and ran into each other as they were trying to make the catch. The one Sunday should have ended with both Eagles players earning passes defensed for keeping each other from a reception:
In back-to-back weeks, Watson only avoids interceptions on deep passes because two defenders run into each other trying to catch the football pic.twitter.com/QEzS0QjogL
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) October 14, 2024
Seventeen passes is a small sample, but Watson is also second worst in the league when it comes to off-target rate on all pass attempts this season, with just under 20% of his passes going awry. Again, Williams ranks last. There are moments in which it looks like he gets stuck on receivers, doesn’t run through his progression and then either throws the ball away or fires the ball into the third row.
Watson is returning from shoulder surgery, but this has been a problem throughout his tenure in Cleveland. His off-target rate was 21.3% last season, before he went down after playing six games.
Even on the throws Watson completes, there’s no consistent accuracy or the sort of ball placement most veteran quarterbacks have. Those sorts of plays don’t go down as misses, but they do reduce yards-after-catch opportunities and create chances for defenders to break passes up. He knows where he needs to place the ball on slants and out routes. He just doesn’t consistently put his passes on target.
There’s no core strength to fall back on. When Watson was at his best in Houston, the Texans’ offense featured RPOs and often worked out of empty backfields. Spreading the offense out forced defenses to tip their hand with coverages, created space for Watson as a runner and scrambler and allowing the young quarterback to identify matchups he wanted to exploit. When working out of empty from 2017-2020, he led the NFL in completion percentage over expected (5.7%), passing yards (3,299) and ranked fourth in QBR.
This Browns’ coaching staff wants to get him back in his comfort zone, but it isn’t comfortable anymore. He has 56 dropbacks out of empty this season. The only other quarterback who has more than 35 such plays is Geno Smith, who is ahead of Watson with 64. Smith has generally been effective working out of empty, so it makes sense that the Seahawks would lean into it.
Watson has not. His 23.2 QBR out of empty ranks 24th. He’s 27th in yards per dropback out of empty, ahead of four quarterbacks who use it no more than two or three times per game. He was averaging nearly 11 dropbacks per game out of empty before Sunday, when the Browns mostly took it out of the playbook and only went to empty looks three times.
How is it impacting the rest of the offense?
Because of these concerns, the Cleveland offense is broken. The Browns don’t have a great running game because teams aren’t scared of getting beat deep and aren’t facing the version of this team that had a healthy Nick Chubb and a great offensive line. They spend the vast majority of their time behind schedule. They don’t hit big plays often, so they need the offense to be consistent in generating first downs to move the ball down the field, something Watson & Co. are doing at one of the worst rates in recent league history. The Browns give up on quite a few third-and-long situations and either run quick game, screens, draws or something designed to avoid a bad situation getting worse with a strip sack or an interception.
When Stefanski’s offense has been at its best, it has used heavy doses of play-action. Stefanski was able to get the best out of Kirk Cousins and Baker Mayfield by upping their play-action rates. The Browns are arguably the league’s most analytically inclined organization, so they’re well aware of the evidence that using play-action increases quarterback efficiency, even if the running game isn’t working well.
Watson is one of the few quarterbacks not getting much of a boost from play fakes. Although he has attempted the third-most play-action passes this season, he ranks 30th in play-action QBR (32.4) and last in yards per play-action dropback (3.9). Those numbers were even worse before Sunday, when he had his best day of the season on play-action, going 6-of-8 for 69 yards, including a 35-yard completion to Jeudy. And in a league in which every team loves exploiting the middle of the field, the Browns are 30th in yards per attempt on throws between the numbers, ahead of the Titans and Broncos.
1:29
Chris Canty: The Browns’ window is ‘slammed shut’
Chris Canty says the Deshaun Watson trade slammed shut the Browns’ window to compete.
Watching tape of this offense, the other players don’t look like they’re having fun. Cooper has been unlucky at times, with an 82-yard touchdown wiped off by a penalty against the Raiders, but he looks like he has never played with Watson before. He has let down his quarterback with a pair of drops, including one which turned into a brutal interception. On Sunday, he was flagged for 15 yards for pulling the facemask of an Eagles defender on a poorly thrown pass. With Cooper reportedly wanting a new deal, I wonder if Cleveland considers moving on from the wideout before the trade deadline.
There are other moments in which the offense just doesn’t appear to have much hope, faith or energy. In Week 5, Wills returned to the lineup and helped allow a sack on a twist where he seemed to give up mid-play. On Sunday, the Browns had a play in which Watson turned one way at the snap and Cooper and Elijah Moore stayed put and didn’t run routes on the backside of the play. Watch the fourth-down completion to David Njoku on Sunday and you’ll see Jeudy, running a slant alongside Njoku, immediately stop after he realizes he’s not getting the ball. Every offense has mistakes or sloppy moments, but the Browns don’t look engaged on the offense.
The other piece of evidence: There are too many penalties. The Browns lead the NFL with 36 offensive penalties this season, a remarkable piece of self-sabotage for an offense that accomplishes as little as they do when they aren’t incurring flags.
Those penalties cost Cleveland dearly in the loss to Philadelphia. An 18-yard run by D’Onta Foreman to get in the red zone was called back for a hold by tight end Geoff Swaim. A third-and-11 scramble by Watson to get in the red zone a second time was brought back after a holding call on reserve lineman Michael Dunn. Both times, the Browns settled for field goals.
The most impactful calls came on the final possession of the game, when Watson played his best. Trailing by seven points, he started the drive by hitting Jeudy on a rare successful play-action shot downfield for 35 yards. Pierre Strong broke a Nakobe Dean tackle on a swing pass for another first down. Cooper’s facemask call set the Browns back at first-and-25, but a short completion to Foreman and a well-thrown slant to Cooper put them in a first-and-goal situation. Two plays later, they faced a third-and-goal from Philadelphia’s 3-yard line.
Everything fell apart. Guard Zak Zinter committed a false start. On third-and-goal from the 8, the Browns went empty and got a matchup they liked with the 6-foot-4 Njoku against the 5-foot-11 C.J. Gardner-Johnson, but the Eagles safety broke up the pass. The Browns then lined up to go for it on fourth-and-goal again out of empty, but Wills committed a false start, and Stefanski elected to kick a field goal to make it a four-point game. Cleveland went from having two plays to try to score a touchdown from the 3-yard line to kicking a field goal. It never got the ball back.
The margin for error on this offense is extremely small. All of the problems I’ve mentioned above both exist in their own right and are intertwined with the others. The penalties and the sacks get the Browns in third-and-long. Watson’s inability to threaten teams deep locks up the run game and forces them into the sorts of drives they can’t sustain. The lack of play-action forces the receivers to win one-on-one, and they’re not playing well enough to do that consistently. And while there might be a drive here or there where things feel better, it doesn’t seem like there’s any significant path toward improvement ahead.
The Flacco problem
If Watson had struggled through last season and the Browns had missed the postseason, it would have been easy to chalk this up to an ideological battle between Watson and Stefanski. That’s a debate the quarterback almost always wins, as former Jets coach Robert Saleh might be able to tell you now. PJ Walker and Dorian Thompson-Robinson weren’t as good as Watson in the same offense a year ago, and so given that Watson went 5-1 before hitting injured reserve, there would have been plausible deniability about identifying who to blame for Cleveland’s woes.
That’s not what happened, though. Joe Flacco, who had been sitting on his couch for most of the 2023 season, signed with the Browns in December and elevated the offense. Flacco was more efficient and effective than Watson despite playing without his starting left tackle or his top two options at right tackle. Flacco even had a huge game against the Jets and their dominant defense without Cooper. Watson’s 5-1 record was mostly a product of the defense playing much better with him than it did with the other passers.
I’m not sure Flacco is a great quarterback, but bringing him in allowed Stefanski to lean into the offense the coach wants to run. The Browns upped their under-center and play-action rates, dramatically improving on Watson’s performance in both areas. Flacco took sacks on 3.8% of his dropbacks, while Watson was taken down more than 9% of the time. Even given that Flacco didn’t get as much defensive help and threw eight interceptions in five games, the Browns went 4-1 with him as the starter and made it into the postseason. And that’s without even considering Brissett, who grossly outplayed Watson when the two were on the Browns roster together in 2022.
Fans aren’t dumb. Neither are players. The Browns couldn’t re-sign Flacco in the offseason because of the potential for a controversy. If Watson struggled early in the season, fans were going to be screaming for Flacco, who had outplayed the incumbent in 2023. The players might have followed. Moving on from Flacco and getting a better quarterback to replace him in Winston made sense, both in terms of upgrading at backup and bringing in someone for whom the fan base had no particular affinity.
Winston is no guarantee, either. He didn’t run much play-action during his time under Sean Payton and Pete Carmichael in New Orleans, and like Flacco, he can throw teams both into and out of games. Going back to 2019, his last full season as a starter with the Bucs, he ranked third in the NFL in QBR on play-action passes, averaging 12.0 yards per attempt. He was also under center for nearly 27% of his dropbacks and ranked fourth in yards per attempt (10.5) there as well.
2:54
Stephen A.: Deshaun Watson looks like he’s given up
Stephen A. Smith has harsh words for Deshaun Watson and his poor 2024 season.
While Winston wouldn’t be a sure thing, there isn’t much risk of downgrading at quarterback moving on from a guy who is producing as little as Watson has been. Watson is off to the worst six-game start in a season we’ve seen from a quarterback in the past 15 years, if not longer. Quarterbacks have been benched this season for less, let alone over that time frame. The only guy who was able to survive a stretch this bad with his job security intact was Russell, who wasn’t an NFL-caliber quarterback and only kept his job because the Raiders had invested the first overall pick to acquire him.
It seems foolish to pretend there’s any other reason for Watson to hold onto his starting role besides his contract. Between the surplus value of the draft picks the Browns sent to the Texans and the guaranteed money he will take home as part of this contract, Cleveland ownership committed well over $300 million to acquire him. The franchise looked past the 11-game suspension he would receive before ever playing a game with the Browns after he was accused by more than two dozen women of sexual misconduct during massage sessions. They ran Mayfield out of the building as part of a trade to the Panthers, eating another $10.5 million in the process.
That bet has not paid off. Since the start of 2022, Watson has started 18 games and put up a 34.4 QBR, ahead of only Zach Wilson and Bryce Young among passers with 500 pass attempts. He has never looked remotely like the quarterback the Browns were expecting to acquire. While there were built-in excuses for his struggles in 2022 and 2023, he has been worse this season. He was outplayed on short notice by a 38-year-old quarterback the rest of the league didn’t want. Just about every starting quarterback of the past 15 years has outplayed his first six games of 2024.
What happens now?
The argument in favor of starting Watson has been reduced entirely to the money. The Browns are on the hook for the remainder of his fully-guaranteed contract. There has never been a player benched for an extended period of time while making anything close to his annual salary of $46 million per season. Teams have taken players such as Derek Carr and Russell Wilson out of the lineup late in the season to avoid future guarantees locking themselves in, but Watson hasn’t even reached the halfway point of his contract, which won’t expire until after the 2026 season.
If there’s any good news for the Browns, it’s that they’ve already paid a significant amount of the money due to Watson. After converting most of his base salary into a signing bonus this August, they have paid him $136.5 million of the $230 million he’s due, or nearly 60% of the contract. They owe about $800,000 for the rest of 2024 and a base salary of $46 million in each of the 2025 and 2026 seasons.
As terrible as that contract is, there’s not much Cleveland can do about it at this point. There’s no leverage to force Watson to take a pay cut. The team would only save about $1 million per year by releasing him, so there isn’t much of a reason to cut him. Keeping him around, even if he isn’t playing, allows the Browns to structure the remaining $93.5 million in favorable ways, likely by converting his 2025 base salary to a signing bonus and then converting some portion of his 2026 salary into a second bonus.
If that happens, Watson could have cap hits of $37.4 million in 2025, $62.2 million in 2026 and then $91.1 million in 2027. That sounds dramatic, but Cleveland rolls over more cap space than any other team as a product of clever contract structuring and some light-spending seasons early on during their rebuild. They have nearly $44 million in cap space this year and will be able to roll the majority of that over into 2025 and beyond. As the cap rises, they should be able to absorb this deal over the next two years without being compromised by cap concerns. The 2027 cap will be a bigger problem, but the Browns could pursue structures that spread some of that money into 2028.
There’s not really any other option. Again, cutting Watson would be more financially constricting. There’s no team that would take any significant portion of this deal via trade given his injuries and struggles. The Browns could theoretically try to get creative and send away players or draft picks along with Watson to get another team to eat some of the remaining cash on the Watson trade in what would amount to their version of the Brock Osweiler swap, but that would mean committing even more assets toward him. On top of that, he has a no-trade clause and would need to approve any deal.
The best thing for the Browns to do, realistically, is to transition as quietly and quickly as possible. Benching Watson for Winston would give them their new starter for the rest of 2024. If they want to claim Watson’s surgically repaired shoulder is giving him problems as a way to save face, they could stash him on injured reserve for the remainder of the season, which would remove the possibility he would return to the starting role if Winston struggles or gets injured.
After that, the Browns need to use the 2025 offseason to find a new starter. The Watson contract will make doing so more difficult, but not impossible. Trading for Cousins would leave them on the hook for $27.5 million in 2025 and either a $10 million buyout or a $35 million salary in 2026. It’s not that wild to imagine them spending $73.5 million on quarterbacks between Cousins and Watson as the nominal backup. Alternately, ESPN’s Football Power Index projects Cleveland to finish with the No. 3 pick in the 2025 draft, which would put it in position to draft a quarterback and pay him a fraction of Watson’s salary.
Watson would become the highest-paid backup quarterback in NFL history by a considerable margin. That’s not going to be a pleasant scenario — and it could end with the team eventually agreeing to let Watson leave while paying the remainder of his salary — but the Browns can’t let the mistake they made in March 2022 paralyze their chances of competing through the end of 2026. They already wasted an elite season from their defense a year ago, and while that unit hasn’t been quite as good in 2024, there’s a young core locked up for years to come, including Myles Garrett, Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah and Denzel Ward. The Browns made a mistake by trading for Watson. Every week they continue to send him out onto the field only compounds that mistake. It’s time to move on.