This NFL Thursday column could also be a Thursday Thorns piece, so we will make it quick and dirty: What were the Cleveland Browns thinking when they gave quarterback Deshaun Watson a $230M guaranteed contract four years ago? We have some facts here that are mystifying, thanks to a report about the team restructuring his contract for the upcoming season. We will get to those one, one-by-one, in a few moments, but the Browns are clearing $36M in cap space through this action, one that was never right.

To review, Watson is the guy who the Houston Texans dumped on the Browns in 2022, after plenty of off-field legal troubles emerged regarding his sexual-predator tendencies with massage therapists. The Texans refused to play him in the 2021 season, designating him inactive every week with a “non-injury reasons/personal matter” label/tag after his record-setting 2020 campaign with the franchise. It takes a lot of integrity for an NFL team to bite the bullet like that, so we applaud Houston here. Well done.

Moving on, though: Watson was traded to the Browns in March 2022, and the NFL suspended him for 11 games in early August 2022. So the Browns just really didn’t think much of this through, even before this contract blunder: “As part of the trade, Watson signed a new, fully guaranteed, five-year, $230 million deal with the Browns, making it the largest guaranteed contract in NFL history at the time of the signing.” Believe it or not, General Manager Andrew Berry still has his job after all this time. Seriously.

Here are some fascinating tidbits four years later after this trade:

  • “Watson, who did not play in 2025 as he rehabbed an Achilles tear from the 2024 season, was set to have an $80.7 million cap hit in 2026, the largest in the NFL.”
  • “Watson, 30, is owed a fully guaranteed $46 million salary in 2026 … Suspension and injuries have limited Watson to 19 games since he arrived in Cleveland.”
  • “Since making his debut, Watson has posted a 33.1 Total QBR, which would be the lowest among qualified passers.”

What kind of GM structures any contract to have a single-season cap hit like that? Even if you know you will restructure it later, that is always dependent on a player (and his agent). It’s a risky strategy, and here Cleveland now is having to defer more payments to Watson down the line as a result. Since the trade, the Browns are 26-42 overall with one postseason appearance in 2023. So, the trade has been a distinct failure on and off the field, really, and the Cleveland franchise is a long way away from healthy right now.

The fact that Watson has played in just 19 games out of a possible 68 regular-season games since the Browns acquired him says a lot, too, not only about the asinine nature of guaranteed contracts but also about the obscene amount of money given to QBs that ends up crippling the entire roster as a result of the salary-cap mayhem. His record as a starter is just 9-10, as well, although he was 5-1 in 2023 when the Browns did reach the postseason. Yet overall, he’s barely been on the field one quarter of the time.

The falloff in performance from his Houston days (104.5 QB rating) in 54 games to his Cleveland tenure (80.7 QB rating) in 19 games is stunning. Of course, missing that entire 2021 season probably created a lot of rust as well as injury risk when he did return in 2022—he played in just six games that season, the same as 2023, before appearing in just seven games for the 2024 season and then missing the entire 2025 campaign. All in all, it’s easy to see why the Browns have never reached the Super Bowl.

And they probably won’t any time soon, at least until they’re done paying all that guaranteed money to their absentee quarterback.