The Browns Will Never Live Down Trading for Deshaun Watson

For so long Cleveland had been a lovable loser of a franchise, but everyone involved sold their souls to acquire a quarterback still facing sexual assault lawsuits.

Maybe this is how it goes after so many years of getting kicked around and picked on. If you’re a laughingstock loser for long enough, you start thinking like the teams that have long bullied you around. You lose your pluck and your grit and you turn a little bit colder because that’s what everyone else does, right? You convince yourself that winning is all that matters to everyone else, too, making all decisions in shameless pursuit of wins feel defensible.

Right?

You trash your own people, smear them on the way out and try to trade them with some anonymous middle finger about childish behavior. You trade for a quarterback who was accused by 22 women of sexual harrassment and assault and pretend that a criminal nonindictment from a grand jury is the same thing as an exoneration. You reward that same player who acted like the entire thing was just an inconvenience for him. How about we ask some of the people impacted by his behavior how it feels to carry pepper spray to work now or choose outfits meant to deter unwanted sexual contact? (Sports Illustrated’s independent reporting uncovered corroborating evidence for one plaintiff’s account, and another woman who isn’t suing shared the details of her massage therapy session with Deshaun Watson as a way of publicly supporting the plaintiffs.)

Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire/IMAGO

Not only did Watson get a financial windfall from Friday’s absolute farce of a signing, but the Browns, according to our Albert Breer, structured the contract in a way that would minimize his fines if the NFL suddenly grows a conscience and suspends him.

The Browns are never going to live down trading for Watson, to whom they immediately gave a five-year, fully guaranteed contract extension. They groveled at such volume, oozed such desperation, that Watson couldn’t ignore them, even after he’d removed them from his list of finalists. Congratulations to a club that now becomes the fifth-best team in its conference at best. It cost them only their souls.

What could Watson have said in those meetings that not only eased their concerns (L-O-L) about the nature of the lawsuits filed against him, but also forced Cleveland to perform cartwheels in the street just to get his pen on paper? What kind of miracle happened inside those four walls?

The truth is that the Browns didn’t care. The Saints didn’t care. The Falcons didn’t care. The Panthers didn’t care. None of those teams for a moment saw the irony in their auditioning for Watson instead of the other way around. A handful of Pro Bowls went a long way, apparently. A down market for quarterbacks turned them all into nicotine fiends without a pack in sight, looking for old cigarette butts to smoke on the sidewalk.

Once upon a time, Cleveland was a lost franchise but in a way we could all respect and admire. The team chugged in the mud, season after season, making comical pratfalls in the process but remaining endearingly The Browns. Maybe they had a lot of quarterbacks, enough that you could fill the full backside of an adult extra-large jersey, but they had fans who loved every one of them to pieces. Have you ever talked to someone from Cleveland about Kelly Holcomb? Did you ever for a second listen to the completely baseless momentary excitement for Jason Campbell? Brandon Weeden? Colt McCoy? Tyrod Taylor? Robert Griffin III? So many diehards believed in all of them, the way we might believe in new presidents or spiritual leaders. It was part of the entire milieu, knowing that it may not work out but willingly going along for the ride anyway, hoping it would all turn out fine.

What a gutting feeling it must be to finally get a supposed long-term answer who offers so little to believe in at all.

Patrick Gorski/USA TODAY Sports

Did you watch the press conference interim coach Mike Priefer gave in January 2021 after Cleveland won its first playoff game in decades, during the moment when he thanked the fans? He nearly cried. He grew up a Browns fan. He understood what it meant against the backdrop of all the decades of losing. What it meant to have a team of homegrown boys come out and whip the Steelers.

Somewhere along the way, that became not good enough. Not fast enough. The entire operation turned into some callous shadow corporation plotting and scheming. They lost what it meant to become the Browns, and, over the course of the next few months, while they lift Watson up on some kind of dais despite 22 civil cases still pending, they’ll lose whatever ounce of genuine goodwill was remaining.

This isn’t a closeted defense of Baker Mayfield, who needed to get better on the field. This isn’t some kind of empty saber rattling for clicks. This is just an acknowledgement of a damn shame. Just a moment when the crushing reality of the NFL sets in; when you wonder how the whole operation could ever act in fans’ best interests when its primary concern is passing along booze and gambling ads, all while tolerating enough unsavory behavior to drown out the reason we all came together around it in the first place.

Maybe some of us, and, again, we’re talking to the Browns’ front office here, just reach a point where the losses drown out the last bit of common sense we have. Maybe we all sell out at one time or another. Maybe our bosses strong-arm us into this kind of behavior and we put up with it because we all have mouths to feed.

That sounds better than the truth about what happened Friday.

Right?

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”