This Is How Far NFL Teams Will Go in Chasing a QB

The Browns made a series of unprecedented moves to land Deshaun Watson. And if they hadn’t, another team would have.

There will be a lot of takes in the coming days over the seismic Deshaun Watson trade. Here’s one we can all agree on: It’s a vivid illustration of how NFL teams regard the most important position in their sport.

In the end, Browns general manager Andrew Berry wasn’t deterred by the first pick his team spent on Baker Mayfield four years ago. Or by all that went into the development of the former Heisman winner. Or by the risk of acquiring a player with 22 civil lawsuits for allegations ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault pending against him. And not even by the rejection he got from Watson himself early in the week.

This, in so many ways, is an extension of what we saw last year, when the Rams and 49ers made deals for quarterbacks despite having starters who, at the time, were in their 20s, had taken them to Super Bowls and had multiple years left on deals that those teams had signed them to. It also relates back to everything the Packers did to mend fences with Aaron Rodgers and what the Broncos did to land Russell Wilson.

It used to be that if you had a good-not-great quarterback, you could still win at the highest level, so long as you were really, really good around him. Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer proved it a generation ago. Even a decade after that, with the bar having risen, the Giants and Ravens really just needed Eli Manning, Joe Flacco and a young Wilson to get hot at the right time, and infrastructure around them took care of the rest.

Now, if you don’t have a great at quarterback, you have to be damn near perfect everywhere else. Which means if you don’t have one, you’ll do anything to find that guy. And if you do have one, you’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you keep him.

“Obviously, the position’s always been important,” said one AFC exec in our March 11 GamePlan column. “Now, if you don’t have one, you flat-out can’t compete. So you’re going to be doing everything you can to please the quarterback—like, your whole plan has to be structured around him now. In the past, there’s maybe not that much emphasis on it. Look at the Colts. They have a really good roster, but you don’t have the quarterback, you don’t even make the playoffs.

“And there’s such a drop-off now from the top eight or so to the next tier. It’s like hitting the lottery if you have one.”

How the Browns hit that lottery, and why the Saints, Panthers and Falcons were gobbling up as many metaphorical tickets as they could to play it, is a microcosm of the whole thing. Those teams, and a host of others, poured a ton of resources into the simple possibility that they might land Watson. They put their security people—ex-law enforcement or military types that every team employs—on the case to try to get a handle on all the accounts of sexual misconduct. Some hired private investigators in Houston so they’d have boots on the ground looking into it.

That, by the way, doesn’t mean Watson’s legal issues are over, or that the allegations against him are false. But it does mean that, once the grand jury decision not to indict him came down, removing the prospect of criminal charges, teams that had already made a massive investment in digging into the matter felt they had gathered enough information to proceed.

And then there was the final piece of this. The Panthers were told they were out Thursday night. At that point, the Browns were, too. But I’d been told not to ignore this detail: Watson’s camp had begun to talk about having new money and new guarantees as part of a reworked contract.

That’s where Berry’s opening was. Presumably eliminated, Cleveland struck with its checkbook, showing a willingness to break new financial ground to get back in, and, after accomplishing that, going the extra mile with the NFL’s first-ever fully guaranteed five-year deal, worth a whopping $230 million, to outdistance everyone else.

So when this was over, the Browns had alienated their old franchise quarterback, offered five picks (first-rounders in 2022, ’23 and ’24, a third in ’23 and a fourth in ’24, with a ’24 fifth coming back), and presented Watson with a landmark contract despite the fact that he had four years left on the deal he signed in Houston just 18 months ago.

They did, too, at the risk of dealing with very serious fallout if it didn’t work. And in today’s NFL, they did it because they had to—and if they hadn’t, someone else would have.

More on Deshaun Watson:

• How 22 Women and One Star Quarterback Got Here
• A Massage Therapist on Her Session With Deshaun Watson
• The Problems With the NFL’s Deshaun Watson Investigation
• Deshaun Watson and the Myth of “Due Diligence”