There's No Time For Any Of This
Patience is not something Deshaun Watson or the Browns have the luxury of
The clock started ticking long before Minkah Fitzpatrick sent Nick Chubb’s lower leg in a direction it should never go, before Chubb uttered a sound you never want to hear, before the crowd in Pittsburgh audibly gasped at the replay. The clock on the 2023 Browns began moving the second the front office traded for Deshaun Watson in 2022 and paid him yacht money, the kind of money that might mean something to someone like Warren Buffett but is incomprehensible to us mere mortals.
The Browns fell to 1-1 after a disastrous loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on national television, wiping any and all feelings of joy that accompanied their Week 1 win and increasingly pushing a hard truth to the center of the table: maybe Watson just doesn’t have the juice.
We’ve got an eight-game sample size on Watson’s Browns tenure now, and it’s bad. His EPA per play in 2023 sits at -0.276, a number better than exactly two other QBs (Kenny Pickett and Trevor Lawrence) and worse than such luminaries as Zach Wilson and Justin Fields, who, and let’s be frank, are absolute dogwater. Add in the six games he played for the Browns last season, and he slots in worse than every QB except Wilson who took part in a minimum of 300 plays, worse than guys like Carson Wentz, Davis Mills and Matt Freaking Ryan. It’s bleak.
Everything about how Watson looks right now is rough, from the process through to the result. He is slow to recognize what’s unfolding in front of him or simply doesn’t trust it. He’s bailing from the pocket early. His accuracy is all over the place. Even some of his completions on Monday night, namely a sprint out in the first quarter in which he hit Amari Cooper for a first down and then a similar play where he scrambled to hit Jerome Ford for a short TD, were just a tick off from where they need to be (the ball to Cooper was low, the TD ball to Ford was just behind him).
Does this feel like nitpicking? Sure. A completion is a completion, especially when it’s a touchdown. But these small accuracy issues on simple throws lead to bigger problems, like the very first snap of the game when Watson missed wide on an easy dig to Harrison Bryant, resulting in a tipped pass that led to a pick-six. That’s how you lose a game in which the Steelers produced -7 yards of offense in the fourth quarter.
After the game, Watson said that he’s still “coming along” and will “be better,” which sounds a lot like what we heard from him last season. The luxury of the runway that Watson had in 2022 is gone now. There’s no more time for him to find a rhythm or keep “coming along.” That’s what those six games were for last season. That’s what the entire offseason was for. That’s what training camp was for. That’s what the preseason was for.
With Chubb done for the season, the volume on that ticking clock is only going to get louder. There can’t be any more offensive performances like the one we saw Monday night. There can’t be misses on easy throws, on throws that would go for first downs and keep a drive alive. There can’t be multiple offensive facemask penalties. You can’t treat a quarterback making $230 million with kid gloves.
Some say time is a construct. Others say time is a flat circle. For Watson and the Browns, time is the enemy.