At some point, the Cleveland Browns have to stop trying to justify the Deshaun Watson trade.
The draft picks are gone. The $230 million is gone. The damage has been done. Nothing that happens in 2026 can change what the Browns gave up or what they received in return.
What Cleveland can control is whether that mistake continues dictating the future of the franchise.
Naming Watson the starting quarterback does exactly that.
And after everything Browns fans have watched over the last several years, it is difficult to view this decision as anything other than another massive mistake.
This isn’t about declaring Shedeur Sanders a future superstar. It isn’t even about saying Dillon Gabriel is definitely an NFL starting quarterback.
Maybe one of them is. Maybe neither is.
The Browns need to find out.
They don’t need to find out anything else about Deshaun Watson.
If This Was a Competition, What Did Watson Do to Win It?
Forget the contracts. Forget draft position. Forget everything that happened before training camp.
If the Browns were truly holding a quarterback competition, then judge the quarterbacks on what they actually did.
Did anyone watch Watson and Sanders throughout the preseason and come away believing Watson was unquestionably the better quarterback?
I certainly didn’t.
Sanders wasn’t perfect. There were still mistakes, inconsistent stretches and plays he will need to clean up. Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But there were also flashes.
There were moments when Sanders extended plays, created outside of structure and showed the confidence and playmaking ability that made him such an intriguing prospect in the first place.
More importantly, those flashes came from a young quarterback who still has room to develop.
Watson is entering Year 10.
The standard cannot possibly be the same.
Watson shouldn’t have needed to look slightly better than a second-year quarterback to win this job. Considering everything that has happened during his Browns career, he should have needed to blow the competition away.
He didn’t.
Yet here we are again.
Deshaun Watson is QB1 in Cleveland.
Jimmy Haslam Already Called It a “Swing and Miss”
This is what makes the decision almost impossible to understand.
Browns owner Jimmy Haslam already admitted what everyone else could see.
The Watson trade was a “swing and miss.”
Those were his words.
Cleveland made one of the biggest gambles in NFL history when it traded three first-round picks for Watson and handed him a fully guaranteed $230 million contract.
It failed.
Admitting that publicly should have represented a turning point for the organization.
Instead, the Browns are right back where they started.
How do you call the move a swing and miss, spend two draft picks on quarterbacks in 2025 and then enter the following season with Watson starting again?
What was the point of drafting Sanders and Gabriel?
What exactly are the Browns trying to accomplish in 2026?
If this season is about determining the future of the quarterback position, Watson provides almost no answers.
Sanders might.
Gabriel might.
The Contract Doesn’t Mean He Has to Play
There will inevitably be people who point toward Watson’s contract as justification for putting him on the field.
That argument makes little sense.
The money is gone regardless of who takes the first snap on Sunday.
Cleveland’s financial obligations to Watson don’t suddenly disappear if Sanders starts. They also don’t become more manageable because Watson is under center.
The Browns made the financial commitment years ago. Starting him now doesn’t recover a dollar of it.
There may be salary-cap reasons why Cleveland cannot simply cut Watson today.
Fine.
Keep him on the roster.
That does not mean he needs to play.
NFL teams have moved on from expensive quarterback mistakes before. At some point, the priority has to become making the best decision for the future rather than trying to extract value from money that has already been spent.
Cleveland cannot save the Watson trade.
It can only decide whether it wants to keep allowing that trade to influence what happens next.
Then Came Watson’s Comments
The football argument alone is enough for me to believe Watson shouldn’t be starting.
His comments throughout his Browns tenure have only made the situation worse.
After hearing boos from Browns fans, Watson took issue with the reaction and suggested the criticism had become personal.
But the relationship between Watson and Cleveland fans didn’t deteriorate overnight.
This is a player who arrived in Cleveland amid enormous controversy after more than two dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct. The Browns traded three first-round picks for him anyway and handed him $230 million guaranteed.
Watson has denied wrongdoing, but the controversy has followed him throughout his Browns career.
Then there was his statement that he had “no regrets” in his life.
Considering everything surrounding his arrival in Cleveland, it was an astonishing choice of words.
There are ways to demonstrate reflection without admitting to allegations you deny. There are ways to acknowledge that your actions and circumstances have affected other people.
Instead, Watson has too often appeared incapable of understanding why Browns fans might feel the way they do.
The boos aren’t simply about one incomplete pass in a preseason game.
They are about everything.
The allegations. The suspension. The trade. The $230 million. The draft picks. The injuries. The performances. The expectations.
Browns fans were told this was the move that would finally solve the quarterback position.
Instead, it became arguably the biggest disaster in franchise history.
Fans have every right to be tired of it.
Play Shedeur Sanders
If I were making the decision, Shedeur Sanders would start Week 1.
Not because I know he’s the franchise quarterback.
Because I don’t.
That’s precisely why I want to see him play.
Give Sanders the offense. Give him the starters. Give him meaningful NFL snaps and allow him to experience everything that comes with being a young quarterback.
Let him succeed.
Let him struggle.
Let him respond to those struggles.
Then evaluate him.
If Sanders proves over a full season that he can be Cleveland’s quarterback moving forward, the Browns have potentially solved their biggest problem.
If he proves he isn’t, Cleveland can enter the 2027 offseason with significantly more information than it has today.
The same logic applies to Dillon Gabriel.
The Browns spent draft capital on both quarterbacks. Developing and evaluating them should be one of the organization’s biggest priorities.
You cannot properly evaluate young quarterbacks from the sideline while a 30-year-old quarterback with no realistic long-term future in Cleveland takes the meaningful snaps.
Maybe Neither Young Quarterback Is the Answer
This seems to be the part of the argument that gets lost.
You don’t have to believe Sanders is the next franchise quarterback to believe he should play.
You don’t have to believe Gabriel is either.
Maybe Cleveland plays both of them and discovers neither is good enough.
That’s still valuable.
Because then you know.
If the Browns reach the end of 2026 and determine Sanders and Gabriel aren’t the answer, they can attack the 2027 quarterback class knowing exactly what they need.
That is progress.
What isn’t progress is reaching the end of another season having spent significant time evaluating a quarterback whose future with the organization was essentially decided before the season began.
Every snap matters when you’re trying to rebuild a quarterback room.
Stop wasting them.
It’s Time to Move Forward
The Cleveland Browns cannot undo the Deshaun Watson trade.
They cannot get the three first-round picks back.
They cannot take back the $230 million contract.
They cannot erase everything that has happened since March 2022.
But they can stop allowing that decision to control what happens next.
Jimmy Haslam already called it a swing and miss.
So, treat it like one.
Watson can remain on the roster for however long the financial realities require. But Cleveland’s priority should no longer be finding out whether it can salvage something from the Watson era.
That era needs to be over.
The priority should be finding the next quarterback.
Start Shedeur Sanders. Evaluate him.
Give Dillon Gabriel an opportunity if Sanders struggles. Evaluate him too.
And if neither quarterback proves capable of being the long-term answer, go find one in 2027.
There is uncertainty in every one of those options.
But there is also possibility.
With Deshaun Watson, there is no mystery left.
The Browns already know how this story ends.
It’s time they finally stop rereading it.