The Browns Faustian Bargain
For probably the first time in my life, I won’t casually root for the Browns as a sort of ancillary team. I’ve rooted for the Browns for a long time. Part of it was pity, obviously, but part of it was some extended family/friend ties, part of it was a general love of underdogs, and part of it was sympathy as a Baltimore native who saw that team get ripped from them. I’ve always been positive towards the Browns. Not the organization, they are long-established clowns, but I hoped for the team to do well because I wanted those fans to be happy. I don’t think I’ll be doing that next season, and for however long Watson is on the team.
The Browns traded their soul for a quarterback. They made a deal with the devil for those Ws. Make no mistake, this will probably help them win. Watson is a good QB. Yes, the Texans were 4-12 under his last playing season, yes, the Browns gave up a ton to secure him and will essentially have to win now, but I think it’ll probably help them compete. It just comes as the gross result of a gross system of events and I don’t think any of us are going to have pity for them anymore. I know I’m not alone in that I want to see this blow up in their faces.
I think we all sort of understood Watson was going to be coveted as an asset. I feel like most of us know the NFL well enough to not be truly surprised that someone would value wins over morals. It was always going to be sad to see teams negotiate a deal for a scumbag because he can ball. We already compromise our morals to some degree to even support this sport. What really got me wasn’t even the sheer scale of the deal. A lot of first-round picks I expected. I didn’t expect that frightening amount of money, but I wasn’t completely surprised. What got me was that the Browns literally structured the contract to work around his expected upcoming league suspension by the league to minimize money lost. That was just…I don’t have the words for that. In a league that is always surprising me with how low they can go, they surprised me again. Sickening.
Watson will not be charged with any criminal charges, but as anyone with a basic understanding of the legal system knows, a grand jury saying that there isn’t enough evidence to charge is not “innocence”. Especially in this line of crime. Sexual assault/harassment/etc is notoriously difficult to prove thanks to there rarely being hard evidence. There is a reason so many women don’t even bother reporting when they’ve become victims. It rarely works out for them. It usually makes things worse. 22 women came forward with a distinct pattern of behavior that ranged from harassment to rape, and legions of people immediately wrote them off all as gold diggers trying to cash in. I don’t know the truth. I can only guess how to feel through my own experience of how these things go and my own impressions of the world, and I do not come out of it believing Watson.
So a guy who threw a fit to force his way off a team and who was accused of horrible crimes and who is currently embattled in a swath of civil suits related to those crimes comes out of this as one of the highest-paid players in history after a pathetic desperate move from a stupid, evil franchise. It’s all so gross.
Fuck the Browns. Fuck the Browns for all of it. I get wanting to move on from Baker, he wasn’t living up to expectations even if he was suffering through injuries last year and is kind of a baby. They put themselves in this position by openly pissing him off, and I don’t blame him for being pissed at the Browns at all. He shouldn’t have gone so public with that dumb open letter, but I completely respect that he felt disrespected by a dumbshit franchise that he successfully gave a small piece of happiness after years of disgust. The Browns went for Watson, pissed off their current QB, and realized they had no other option but to throw everything they could at Watson since Baker wanted out.
They deserve every joke and insult thrown their way. Steelers fans especially probably can’t wait. This is worse than Roethlisberger. Roethlisberger was already a Pittsburgh hero before we found out he was a piece of shit. It made sense that Steelers fans would be conflicted and look the other way on Ben, even if it was gross. The Browns traded for the rapist this time. They sought the rapist out. I already feel myself softening towards Pittsburgh. I used to like the Steelers as a kid, and for a while as a teenager. I liked Big Ben and rooted for them against the Seahawks, for The Bus and Troy Polamalu. I was annoyed when they beat the Cardinals in 2008, but that was mostly success fatigue. I didn’t hate the Steelers until they supported Big Ben’s rape redemption tour. Now that Ben is gone, I’ll probably soften to the Steelers to some degree. The Browns have the rapist now. Plus whatever team signs Jameis.
I’ll bring back the hydra this summer. I was optimistic for the Browns, but now I will happily revive that icon of failure and hope it only gets worse as long as he’s there.
Time to bandwagon the Lions! I mean, they probably had a coach that committed sexual assault, but that dude’s gone and replaced with a guy who goes for kneecaps instead.
Paraphrasing one of Dave’s under-comic comments from quite some time ago(can’t find the exact comic itself, but I’m pretty sure he wrote something of the sort):
“You just can’t root against the Browns. They’re the one team that, as long as they’re playing against your own team, you’d be perfectly happy winning and you would root for as a secondary team.”
For the past several years, this statement of Dave’s has been tested VERY sorely on my part. So many (personal) reasons I had to not support and, in fact, actually dislike the Browns, unlike the Lions, the Bengals, the Texans, the Jets, and other such ‘unlucky’ teams. (what aforementioned reasons are, that’s not relevant to the topic at hand)
Yet I tried to look past those. Whatever their faults, the Browns did deserve some modicum of pity, what with their mishaps they had in their original iteration, what they went through with Modell’s move to Baltimore, what they’ve endured AFTER Modell, etc. While I won’t deny that some dark corner of my mind found the Johnny Manziel years and the Hue Jackson years of the Browns were a great example of prime entertainment(yes, I’m a heartless person… *shrugs*), I still acknowledged that the Browns and their fans might deserve something good for once. Enough that when they finally got to the playoffs after nearly two decades and actually got a playoff win, I found more reasons to view it as positive instead of actually griping that ‘they were supposed to suck’.
Then this happens.
This is the last straw.
One, they willingly sought out a rapist. And threw all the money at him. This is disturbing on so many different levels but Dave touched on this with his own commentary, so I won’t bother repeating those points when my own points are mostly identical. I just have to note that, after all the fun they poked at the Steelers and Ben, the irony is simply stunning.
Two, Baker. How DARE they do Baker dirty like that.
Sure, Baker wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t a ‘model QB’. He had plenty of his own faults. You probably couldn’t say that he’s among the best tier of NFL quarterbacks with a straight face. Still, he was the prime factor and inspiration to the Browns pulling themselves out of the dark hole that was ‘one win in two seasons’, instilling hope and optimism into the team, becoming the best QB they ever had and literally giving the them their first playoff victory since the team reboot. I’m not a Baker fan by any metric, but I fully respected what he did for the Browns, and even if he was somewhat lacking in the dependency department, he gave his all for a team that everyone deemed a lost cause. He embraced Cleveland, despite its notoriety for being a place where quarterbacks go to die. He played his heart out last season, through injuries, for his team. To make them win and get them to the playoffs, which they only narrowly missed. And then he’s repaid… with THIS.
And Browns fans are no better. I’m already seeing rationalizations that the Browns did nothing wrong since it’s natural they should try ANYTHING to improve/upgrade the team. I’m already seeing Browns fans equating Baker as a ‘jilted girlfriend’, or worse, a ‘prostitute’ who thought that what he had with the Browns was special just because he gave them one playoff trip and one playoff win, that Baker certainly ‘wasn’t an adult’ capable of understanding ‘business decisions’, and that Baker should just fuck off instead of being a hindrance to them winning with Watson. I get that they wouldn’t be the majority of Browns fans, and certainly fans rationalize player departures(Dave has a few comics on said topic already), but… but…
It’s.. it’s sickening. I’m possibly the farthest one can think of from a Browns fan, yet what the team has done and these reactions from the fans have shaken me to the core. Yes, I know that the NFL is largely bereft of morals. Yes, I knew that Watson would be a highly coveted asset. But this is beyond what I imagined. This has shocked me further than what would have happened if the last-minute favorites, the Saints or the Falcons, would have acquired Watson instead of the Browns.
I’m not even going to go into the specifics of the trade and Watson’s new contract, about whether this Herschel Walker/Ricky Williams-esque trade was actually a smart move for the Browns to make. I honestly don’t care to analyze. Some other longtime reader would be more than happy to provide a more in-depth analysis than I would ever be capable of. After all, I’m just a casual fan, too casual to even have a single favorite team to always root for.
But I will just make one observation. Dave called this trade a Faustian bargain. In the story of Faust, after Faust deals with Mephistopheles, he actually does get what the devil promises him, it’s just that the price to pay was his soul and eternal damnation. The Herschel Walker and Ricky Williams trades clearly showed that the honors lied with the team that got the slew of high-quality draft picks, not the team that got the single star player. This time it’s a quarterback instead of a running back, and clearly franchise QBs are the priceless diamonds of the league, so there may be some differences. However, history clearly does not look kindly on the Browns for this deal, and they will have to hope fervently that history is proven wrong and they do get what the trade promises them.
History is rarely proven wrong.
And I’m certainly hoping it’s not proven wrong in this case.
PS. It was only five years ago that the Texans sent a ton of draft picks to Cleveland just to acquire the draft pick for Watson and to offload Brock Osweiler’s hilariously stupid contract. Now… the Browns send a boatload of draft picks to Houston… to acquire Watson. History certainly does have a sense of irony, it seems.
PPS. Sorry for the wall of text, that got long
Spot on, mate. I only have one quibble with your querying. I don’t think Baker deserves nearly as much credit as you’re giving him. Similar to Dak in Dallas, his W/L ratio was HEAVILY reliant on the running game. I don’t remember the exact stat, so I unfortunately can’t quote it. He was the epitome of an “average” qb, and between him, Manziel, and Myles Garrett, I have never felt anything towards the Browns but loathing, even though I also feel nothing but loathing towards the Steelers, Mike Tomlin excepted.
With you on everything else, though.
A lot of dedicated, decades-long fans left the team over this, either temporarily or permanently. I’m one of the temporary ones – I’ll come back once Watson is gone, or on the very slim chance that he acknowledges that he did something wrong and shows some kind of genuine contrition, but I don’t expect that to happen.
I should be gloating about stealing Amari Cooper from the Cowboys and picking up Matt Ryan or Gardner Minshew at a discount to replace Baker after he decided to force the team’s hand, but instead I can’t root for the team that I love. I hope Watson fails hard and gets traded, or even better gets spiked in practice and has to retire due to a ruptured testicle before he ever plays a down in a Browns uniform.
I’d have liked Baker to come to Miami, but we just brought in Teddy after getting shot of the chocolate blowtorch that was Jacoby Brisket. Three QBs that I like on my team? Bit greedy. I’m struggling to think of the last time that happened – Dan Marino, Scott Secules and Crash Jensen going back to like 1989-91 I think…
Mmmmm, you had me at brisssssskeeeeeeettttttt.
I’m hoping the NFL suspends Watson for one game for every accusation. I’m sure they won’t, but I can hope.
Even with how the contract was structured, it was stupid to guarantee that kind of money to someone who still has unresolved legal issues.
He Said-She-Said is one thing. When it’s TWENTY-TWO such things, I’d start looking for where that smoke’s coming from. Doesn’t look like they even did that.
I’m just glad Miami held off, because that had me REAL worried – we’ve got enough shit going down right now with the aftermath of Coach Flores getting hoofed (and for the record I hope he kicks back at Ross & Grier as hard as he can) – and let the Browns Browns it. He’s their poison now.
Same.
My stance has always been. Sure, maybe one or two of them could be lying and trying to cash in. What are the chances ALL 22 are lying? What are the chances there’s ONLY 22? I believe women because there are too many in my life that I’ve talked to who have had to keep their hands down for fear of retaliation and public shaming. I hope anybody celebrating Watson’s “innocence” doesn’t have women they care about in their life.
I used to be friendly with the Browns, they new the pain of a team just leaving you, being in a division with a dominant QB, national media looking down on you and saying that your team is over preforming. And our teams would look after each other, we beat the Bengals year after year, and they took Brock Lobsters contract. Then we drafted He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Massaged and they got Baker and I thought our two franchise could turn a corner.
When crap hit the fan, I personally was routing for the Browns to succeed. Next they enter the sweepstakes for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Massaged and I hoped they wouldn’t get him. I was glad they were out, but then they ended up winning and with that contract. Browns ownership said they wanted an adult for a QB, well they got a QB who demanded a trade when he didn’t get the GM he wanted. So take care, I’m going to be over here watching that GM spend those picks and General Mills develop and be happy to watch Football again with out that stink. I haven’t been excited to watch football since the beginning of the Pani-D. I can’t wait to see the future of the Texans.
¨I’m going to be over here watching that GM spend those picks and General Mills develop and be happy to watch Football again without that stink. I haven’t been excited to watch football since the beginning of the Pani-D. I can’t wait to see the future of the Texans.¨
Bit Optimistic there aren’t you? Even if Mills turns out to be a franchise QB which is still a giant if, we have to win in a loaded AFC, we need to draft at least one HOFer in the picks we received along with several quality players. And in my years watching the Texans, the moment something finally goes right, something bad immediately happens again.
If there is one thing for Texans fans to be optimistic about it is that, after years and years of Bob and Cal McNair trying and failing (and failing and failing and failing) to recreate the “Patriot Way”, they finally hired a Bellichick guy in Caserio who actually did something Bellichick’s Patriots would do (all due respect to Bill O’Brien’s AFC South titles)… fleece another team for draft picks, getting the team out of a thorny situation in the process.
Will it continue? Ha! Easterby and Cal are still there, so probably not… but the team (especially Caserio) gets an A for this.
To me they got a B they should have gotten a player instead of a 3rd and 4th or at least 1 2nd rounder
Wanting all those pics, now who is being optimistic? And I honestly don’t expect us to even have a shot for at least 3 years, more like 5. But He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Massaged is gone, so I’m going to enjoy that.
True True; To a better Future! (Hopefully)
Eh Matt Ryan isnt gona be with the Colts forever and King Henrys rule is also in its 2nd half already going by almost every RB with his workload before him. And if your afraid of the Jags….. Dont get me wrong I wouldnt expect the Texans to win anything right away but if we are talkin developing your QB and your picks so you can compete in 23 and 24 its a realistic timeframe
You know what I hope? I hope that Watson’s time with the Browns is even more fraught with drama than his time in Houston. I hope that one of the next few seasons, Watson gets so mad that he skips the season again and leaves the Browns writhing in the dust. I hope the Browns only win a single game that season, and only to keep them from the strange satisfaction of another winless season. I want them to watch as Baker takes his new team, preferably one in the Browns’ division, to the promised land, and I want him to gloat so, so hard because they deserve it. I want them to be so bad that they draft first overall, and I want the Texans to use that first pick to draft the next Tom Brady, a guy so good and so successful that he’ll make people hate the Texans like they hated the 2000-2019 Pats. And through it all, I want the Browns to watch the guy they should’ve picked. To look on and wonder what it’s like to have a good quarterback. To wonder what it is like to feel joy, to have good players you didn’t sell your soul and your future for. Because honestly, this is what they deserve.
Of course, none of this matters and life is cruel so Watson’s gonna take the Browns to the SB multiple times.
Even if it was all consensual, he still got his butt fingered. I don’t want a QB like that.
Man, if you haven’t tickled your prostate you don’t know what you’re missing.
I do want a QB that can hit the spot in a tight gap, I still don’t want a rapist.
“Sexual assault/harassment/etc is notoriously difficult to prove thanks to there rarely being hard evidence”
Giggity.
I am so pissed off about this. Even three days later I’m still pissed off about it. I guess my Sundays just freed up for the foreseeable future. I can move on with the team once he’s gone, but I won’t support them while he’s the starter.
Honestly I was happy that Watson was traded, it freed like 40 million in Cap space and the Browns got a Rapist at QB. I did feel a little bit regretful considering that everything good that happened from 2017 to 2020 happened because of Watsons Magician plays like his escape sack a couple of years against the Bill in the Wild Card. I would have rather seen Deshaun Watson get justice however rather than him being the highest paid player in NFL history.
He is also the only True Winner of the deal, the Texans got cheated and the Browns made the morally wrong choice.
Also Fuck Deshaun Watson
Yeah I am done with the team right now.
Sure i only started actively watching football in 2018, but i loved that team to death, i love most of the players and even if Baker was injured, I totally understood moving on from him.
But not like this. Not with a freaking rapist.
I won’t be able to root for the Browns as long as he’s there. No freaking way. I don’t want him to be the man who brings “happiness” to the franchise after all he’s done.
The pathetic press releases from the FO and the Haslams + the nicely arranged contract is a dead giveaway to his culpability in my opinion. It’s sickening that we went to such lengths to protect a dude who might be a sexual predator.
We can only hope that between suspensions, taxes, and the civil suits Deshaun never actually sees a penny of that new contract because fuck Watson.
They made it so his Paragraph 5 salary this season is only $1M, so he’d only miss out on $500K or so.
I mean, after taxes he’s left with 150 million or so, ~7 million per civil suit seems fair
3% goes to his agent too, so that’s another $7M or so off the top.
I’ll be up front and say that I’ve really never liked the Browns. I was a rare case of a fan outside of the AFC North having an overall dislike of them as a franchise as well as their fans for a number of reasons. I disliked them after they drafted Manziel. I disliked them more after what happened between Myles Garrett and Mason Rudolph. I learned about Bottlegate and really disliked their fans. I came to basically hate them after the way the team as well as their fans treated OBJ. And I even hated them for how they treated Baker Mayfield, despite not being high on him as a passer. I have no love that team, the city, nor the fans, and I found the pity party surrounding them incredibly obnoxious. Yet, my initial reaction to them trading for Watson was lukewarm at best.
In terms of simply trading for Watson, as much as I hate to say this, I get why they did it and can’t really blame them. I see this sort of deal as a product of the culture that has been cultivated by not only the NFL, but sports leagues in general. Teams across the board are always willing to excuse even the most heinous of crimes so long as the player(s) involved are really good at balling out. If the Browns didn’t shell out to get Watson, another down bad, QB-needy franchise like Atlanta would have picked him up, and by that reasoning, I’d have to commend the Steelers for being one of the few QB-needy teams to turn their nose up at Watson and even pull a 2017 Bears by choosing Mitchell Trubisky over him. This is a league run almost exclusively by men, that exclusively employs men, and promotes a hyper-masculine culture and attitude, so it’d be silly to believe that any team would have a particularly progressive view of sex crimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them held the view of, “If he ain’t going to jail then he can play!” so of course they would hold Deshaun Watson to the same standard. This was my stance, at least until I saw the contract.
The fact that the Browns gave him so much money doesn’t bother me. It’s the fact that, as you noted, they safeguarded the contract so just in case Watson actually DOES receive any sort of consequence for his actions, it won’t even affect his bottom line. I can barely excuse these teams and owners being ignorant about sexual assault and rape culture. I cannot justify this. This is abhorrent, and it just cements my view of the Browns being a shit-stain franchise undeserving of the all the pity they receive. I respect the fans that have decided to stop supporting them over this, but sadly those are few relative to the ones celebrating this move and rationalizing it. How ironic that they spent literal YEARS trashing Steelers fans for defending Ben Roethlisberger and taking a moral high ground just to pull a stunt that is significantly worse. Like you said, at least Steelers fans had an understandable reason for why they defended their QB. The fuck do Browns fans have?
Frankly, I hope the Browns rot. I hope Baker Mayfield balls out wherever he ends up. I hope the Texans turn those picks into a dynasty. Cleveland deserved all of the suffering that team has been through over their history, and they deserve all of the suffering that will ultimately come their way. Fuck that poverty franchise and fuck any of their fans defending this. I’d say fuck Deshaun Watson too, but he’d likely get off to it.
im just pissed that the steelers fans i regularly grief about kicking a franchise thats perennially down will now have a point
I think we all agree here that this whole thing is a toxic mess and we’re all rooting against DeShaun and the Browns. What I don’t understand is why folks see this as a good football move. DeShaun has been out of football for a year and last lead the Houston Texans to a 4-12 record which made Dolphins fans and Eagles fans very happy (and possibly San Francisco fans if Lance can ball out). And I know what y’all will say that wins aren’t a quarterback stat and you need a good team around them. Well, if wins aren’t a quarterback stat and you need a team around them, then why are you giving him a quarter of your cap and giving away the picks that give you the cheap talent that would allow you to build a good team around him? And I’m not convinced wins aren’t a quarterback stat. Wilson never had a 4-win season.. Neither has Rodgers. Brady never even had a losing season and Peyton didn’t have one outside of his rookie year (I think). So maybe wins aren’t exactly a QB stat but they sure are correlated to having a high end quarterback. Watson went 4-12, that puts him on a lower tier and certainly undeserving of such a haul regardless of where you land on the quarterback wins argument.
That same season he led the league in yards, finished 3rd in completion percentage, tied for 7th with passing touchdowns, had only 7 interception and led Houston to a top 5 passing offense with only Brandin Cooks and Will Fuller and below average offensive line. Houston that same year finished 31st in Rushing offense, 24th in Passing Defense, had a historically Bad 32nd ranked rushing Defense, allowed an Average of 29 points per game and had just 9 takeaways all year.
Also Peyton had literally had 4 Hall of Famers he played with, Brady always had a top tier Defense that has bailed him out, Wilson had Legion of Boom was always surrounded by a decent team (Except for the last couple of year), Only Rodgers carried his team the same way Deshaun tried to do in 2020.
That season was a perfect example of why QB wins aren’t a QB stat
Fuck Deshaun why did he have to be so good.
Oh sorry, I missed this answer. What you’re saying is wins aren’t a quarterback stat and it’s more about the whole team. Well, same thing applies, doesn’t it? No quarterback is going to overcome the diminished team due to the trade and contract, so again, how does it help the Browns to have a great quarterback if it isn’t going to translate to wins?
the Browns aren’t the Texans, they have a great running back duo and a great offensive line and they have Amari Cooper on their team and they have a way better defense than the Texans,and Watson is a clear upgrade over Mayfield.
But he won’t be on the team for part of this year and when he comes back he’ll take some time to get up to snuff. So this year they won’t be a Super Bowl contender. We won’t know what the team will be like next year but it’s hard to think they’ll be as good with that giant albatross of a contract and no cheap top talent after this year
Actually they still have multiple years of their key starters playing for a couple of years. And the Nfl sadly hasn’t suspended him yet
The NFL haven’t suspended him yet but they will. Even DeShaun and the Browns know this, that’s why the contract looks the way it does. And yes, the Browns might have some key players under contract through next year, but they’ll also be one year older and more beat up, that’s a long time in the NFL
Also I wanna point out that they’ll be playing in a division with the Bengals, who are the defending AFC champions, the Ravens who were decimated by injuries last year and still came close to a playoff spot and the Steelers, who haven’t had a losing record with Mike Tomlin. I understand Baker was the third best QB in that division, but can you actually say that Watson is better than Burrow and Lamar?
Why is this the first time I’ve heard that Amari Cooper is on the Browns?
I knew he was on the trading block but still
So what you’re saying is he isn’t good enough to overcome a bad team around him. So when he gets the chance to play a full season he’ll be on a diminished team due to the trade and contract that he’ll have to overcome. How does that make the Browns better?
Ever heard of Nick Chubb? Myles Garrett? Denzel Ward? Amari Cooper? Wyatt Teller? Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah? Kareem Hunt?
The Browns have far more talent on their roster than the 2020 Texans did. It’s why they won 8 games last year with bottom-5 QB play. I understand not liking this trade form a moral perspective, but from a football perspective it makes perfect sense.
A healthy Baker got the Browns to the divisional round. For the trade to be worth it, Watson needs to do better than that. On a team that now has first round picks for the next three years and a lot of cap space allocated to the quarterback. Those players won’t be there or won’t be as good when Deshaun can be there for the whole year because he get a suspension
The draft isn’t one round long; teams can find talent outside of the first round. The Rams haven’t had a first round pick since 2017, and they won’t have one until 2024. Didn’t stop them from winning a Super Bowl. As far as the cap goes, there are a million ways to manipulate it. Watson and Cooper will be making 65 million this year, but they’ll only cost the Browns 15 million in cap space (which is the real reason they structured Watson’s contract the way they did, in case anyone cares).
The Browns don’t need Wason to be better than Burrow or Jackson, they just need him to be better than Mayfield. They went 3-3 against the rest of the AFC North last year, including handing the Bengals their worst loss of the season. If they can do that with Mayfield, then they can surpasss that with Watson.
This year is irrelevant. Watson is one year out of football and facing a significant suspension, they will not be a factor in the playoffs. Will 2023 with Watson be better than 2020 with Baker? I highly doubt it.
Watson isn’t going to be suspended the entire or even most of the year, so this year is most certainly not irrelevant.
If you really don’t think the Browns will be better with Watson QBing their team than Mayfield, then with all due respect, you don’t understand football.
I never said the whole or most of the season. I’ve been going off six weeks, which seems to be the number thrown about most often. That’s six games with a backup and two or three games before Watson gets back into his groove. That’s half the season with subpar quarterback play, no way you’re in the playoffs in the AFC, especially in the North. So next year, will they have a better record than 11 wins? Possibly. Will they go farther than the Divisional round, more importantly? I doubt it. Will they be able to improve in the years after that? Even more doubtful. My standard for “being better” is results. If they can get to the AFC Championship Game, they’ll be better and the trade will make sense football-wise. Otherwise, I don’t see the improvement
Like the other guy said, the Browns won 8 games last year with bottom 5 QB play. They don’t need Watson or whoever their backup is to dominate to be able to win football games, whether it’s against their division or the rest of their schedule. Last year they didn’t make the playoffs at all, they only have to make the playoffs THIS year for the trade to be worthwhile for THIS season. They have the entire 5 years of the deal (and probably longer if they can extend Watson) to surpass the whopping heights of one playoff win they achieved with Mayfield.
The Browns still have a lot of weapons around him, they are not diminished yet. I do agree with you that the contract is awful long term and eventually they won’t be able to keep all of them, but for the next two years they may very well be super bowl contenders. I do agree that Watson will be rusty right away, he has been out of football for over a year now, but he will eventually be in prime form.
Watson’s 2020 season was basically ironclad evidence of QB Wins being a terrible way to measure quarterbacks. That Texans team was terrible but it had nothing to do with Deshaun Watson himself. Wilson generally had good teams or at least teams significantly better than those Texans. Rodgers had good-to-great offensive lines and solid targets. Brady had the greatest coach ever backing him up. Peyton spent his whole prime throwing to 4 hall of famers behind a dominant OL. None of them dealt with rosters as bad as that Texans squad.
By all accounts, it’s a good deal for the Browns, but honestly that means nothing given how morally bankrupt they’ve shown themselves to be.
I kind of agree about this being a bad deal for the Browns. That’s an absurd amount of cap space he’s taken up, it’s rare that a team can succeed when that much is tied up in one player. He’s a great QB, but he hasn’t played in quite some time, and it’s obviously safe to question how much players will view him as a leader.
It is not great long term, however for short term success it’s a great deal, They have a good defense led by Myles Garrett, a terrific Offensive Line, and a great running back core led by Kareem Hunt and Nick Chubb.
Its hard to view Watson as not succeeding in Kevin Stefanakis system.
I actually practice criminal law in Harris County (where the Watson case was) and while the Grand Jury not indicting (issuing a no bill) certainly doesn’t definitively mean he’s “innocent,” there’s also an old saying that “a Grand Jury will indict a ham sandwich,” especially considering that the standard of proof is probable cause, which is much lower than the jury trial “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. So while it’s fair to say that being found “not guilty” at a trial doesn’t mean innocence, the Grand Jury issuing a “no bill” is significantly different and means there were pretty serious credibility issues.
I’m sure this is generally true, but when it comes to wealthy, powerful men against vulnerable women, the established patterns don’t necessarily hold. For what it’s worth, the police reports reportedly call the victims credible
I’ve been on both sides of the aisle in Harris County and it’s an unspoken policy in the DA office that if they have a high profile, questionable case they’d rather let the grand jury no-bill it than just dump it, because people don’t understand what prosecutorial discretion means.
But sexual assault is one of the most difficult charges to try without physical evidence, if not the most difficult. The fact that the DA didn’t want to move forward on this doesn’t mean there were credibility issues. It means they knew they couldn’t win a he said/she said trial against a famous athlete, no matter how many complainants there were, no matter how airtight their testimony was, without any forensic evidence to present.
Agreed.
There is a reason that Watson hired Rusty Hardin in particular, after all…
I don’t know how many sexual assault cases you’ve tried but most of the time there’s no physical evidence, due to any number of reasons but usually delayed outcry. If the state didn’t prosecute sexual assault cases without DNA or any other physical evidence they wouldn’t prosecute very many of these cases at all. Maybe one out of ten filed and prosecuted cases will have DNA, if that.
I think it’s fair to point out that the full saying on indictments is longer than that, and points out how the police won’t get indicted. Let’s just say that even that saying posits that if the prosecutor does not want an indictment for whatever reason, one will not happen.
It’s ok Dave as a Browns fan I too can’t root for this team. Honestly, I felt better during 1-31 and 0-16 than I do now.
The Browns PR statement was even worse. Like why even put it out if you’re not going to even try.
I’ve been a Browns fan for 5 decades now. I’ve put up with a LOT of shit on and off the field over that time, but this time I’M OUT.
Fuck the Browns. (Is that user name taken?)
HEY DAVE!
How about a bandwagon guide for us Browns fans looking for a new team to root for?
No hurry — I’ll probably wait till the playoffs to pick a new team. (Hey, after all this time I want to increase the chances of “my” team winning a Super Bowl…)
The Bills are a popular choice among my friends. I’m just out on them until he’s gone. I can accept that they were willing to sell their soul for a championship but I can’t root for Watson himself. I guess that’s where my line is.
There will have to be a complete regime change from owners on down before I’ll come back.
Fair enough. Everyone’s line is in a different place.
I’ve been an unwavering Browns fan since the 80s, but I can’t after this. I felt such a sense of relief after that initial report of the Browns being out. I refuse to root for this team while Jimmy Haslem is still the owner. This franchise deserves every shitty thing that will happen to them. It’s inevitable.
And I second a toon about who we should root for now, because I already of a list of teams I can’t bandwagon: Steelers, Ravens, Bengals, Commanders, Eagles, Cowboys, Packers, Seahawks
Are you also a Giants fan or do you just hate the rest of the NFCE?
You… you do know pretty much everyone outside of the NFCE hates the NFCE, right? Philly cheers when people get hurt, WTF’s Commie HQ is nothing BUT Deshaun Watson types, and Dallas… well, if you don’t know why we all hate Dallas, I feel kinda bad for… wait, no I don’t. If you don’t know why everyone hates Dallas, that’s kinda funny. *fits of giggles*
The only reason the Giants don’t get that kinda hate right now is we too pitiful to hate. Cuz we been dowwwwwn soooo loooooong, being down don’t bother us. We’re gonna take all our troubles, and drown them in the deep blue seeeeeeeaaaaa!
Also helped by the fact that when they go up, it came at the expense of the Patriots.
I don’t HATE the NFCE. But with Snyder running things in Washington, I couldn’t support that, either. Dallas is too popular, even though they haven’t won in 25 years, and I wouldn’t want to associate with most Philly fans
I also had the sigh of relief when the Browns were erroneously “ruled out”.
That turns out to be my last good Browns memory (out of the several I might have had over the decades…)
Haslam was a piece of shit fraud artist before this. Im not surprised.
“There’s no evidence!! Free deshaun!! Innocent!!”
Something is seriously wrong with society right now, especially within America. I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty, but I’ll be damned if I dismiss the accusations of TWENTY TWO different women because cool man throw football good. The browns organization should be embarrassed with themselves along with the league higher ups. Literal scumbags get to run around making thousands per game but god forbid a player decides to place a bet on a game he wasn’t playing in. I know the Ridley comparison is shaky at best but when looking at it on a flat surface, the nfl looks goofy as hell with many of their decisions with these types of situations.
I keep coming back to this comic and laughing at it — it does such a good job exposing the idiocy of the whole thing. Your execution of it, Dave, is particularly spectacular. I finally figured out what does it for me: it’s the move from the evil red eyes of the snake to the dumbfounded open-white-eyed stare in the last two panels and the demon-snake fumbling to get his pen ready because he can’t believe what he’s lucked into. That makes me giggle each time I look at it. Well done.
Is it too soon to start recruiting new fans to a fanbase that could use a few more bandwagoners?
We’ve got an exciting, fun to watch young QB! We’ve got a solid receiving corps, including a RB who plays air guitar every time they score! We’ve got two of the top 5 edge rushers! We’ve got a pretty good looking secondary!
To quote a famous cowboys fan… I don’t want to talk about it…