Deshaun Watson injury: Contract fallout, future for Browns - ESPN

Deshaun Watson's first season with the Cleveland Browns started late because of a personal conduct policy suspension. And his second ended early, the team announced Wednesday, because of a shoulder injury.

It's fair to say the acquisition of Watson -- so far, at least -- has not worked out the way the Browns had hoped it would. To recap: The Browns traded six draft picks, including three first-rounders, to the Houston Texans for Watson in March 2022. In order to get him to waive his no-trade clause and agree to go to Cleveland, the Browns also agreed to tear up his contract and give him a new one worth $230 million over five years, every penny fully guaranteed.

The size and historic significance of that contract rankled many around the league. Steve Bisciotti, owner of the division-rival Baltimore Ravens, said on the record a few weeks later that he didn't think the Browns should have done it, and sure enough it became a point of contention when Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson went into his own contract extension talks with the team asking for similar levels of guarantees.

The Ravens eventually got Jackson to relent and signed him to a long-term deal under a more traditional structure. If other team owners feared Watson would establish a precedent and force them to guarantee money in quarterback extensions, those fears have so far proven to be unfounded. The consequences of the cost the Browns paid to acquire Watson have fallen entirely on the Browns themselves, and they are not insignificant.

With the news that Watson will have played just 12 games over the first two seasons of the contract, we wanted to take a look at the deal itself and all of its surrounding elements, examine where things stand and what it all means moving forward.

Jump to: Sizing up the deal | Can Cleveland move on? What it means for the Browns What it means in the bigger picture

Not very good. Over the past two seasons, the Browns are 8-4 in games that Watson has started and 5-9 in games he hasn't. That includes a 3-3 record with Watson in 2022 after the Browns went 4-7 during Watson's 11-game suspension for violating the NFL's personal conduct policy following accusations from more than two dozen women of sexual assault and sexual misconduct during massage sessions.

Sure, he seems to make a difference when he plays, but whose starting quarterback doesn't? This isn't about whether the Browns are better with Watson than with the backups they've had behind him. This is about the expectations that come with a guy who cost three first-round picks and $230 million.

There is no measure -- objective or subjective -- by which Watson has been worth the price so far. Consider the fact that C.J. Stroud, the 2023 first-round draft pick of Watson's former team, has thrown for more yards as a Texan than Watson has as a Brown.

But leaving aside that Watson will reach the end of the contract's second year having played in only a third of his team's games, the fact is he hasn't played very well. Among the 32 NFL quarterbacks who have started at least five games this season, Watson ranks last with an off-target percentage of 21%, according to ESPN Stats & Information. On that same list, he's 28th in completion percentage (61.4%), 25th in yards per attempt (6.5) and 23rd in Total QBR (44.7). The Browns' 6-3 record this season has a lot more to do with their defense than it does with their $46 million-per-year quarterback.

Moreover, Watson's contract represents an anchor around the neck of the team's finances. The Browns currently have the second-most salary cap space of any team this season, but that's mainly because they restructured Watson's deal in the offseason. (More on that later.) Projections for the 2024, 2025 and 2026 seasons show the Browns at or near the bottom of the league in cap space.

So what the Browns have is a player who is projected to take up maybe 25% of their cap space per season moving forward, has barely played and hasn't played very well when he has been able to take the field. You don't need to be a GM or a cap expert to know this, so far, has been a disaster.

In a word, no. In two words, hell no. NFL contracts -- because they're almost never fully guaranteed and because of cap rules that allow teams to play with salary and bonus structures -- often come with escape hatches that allow the teams to move on after a couple of years if they aren't working out. Watson's contract is not such a deal.

The restructure that the Browns and Watson agreed to this past offseason reduced his 2023 cap number from around $55 million to around $19 million. But restructuring for short-term savings means inflating cap numbers in future years. And when all of the salaries in future years are fully guaranteed, you can't save cap space by cutting the player and just eating the dead money left over from the signing bonus.

While Watson's original cap number was about $55 million in each of the 2024, 2025 and 2026 seasons, it's now up to about $64 million for each of those years, plus an additional $8.984 million in 2027 after the deal is over.

If the Browns wanted to release Watson next offseason, they'd have to pay him $138 million in cash and carry roughly $201 million in dead money on their 2024 cap. Even if they designated him as a post-June 1 cut, the dead money hit would be roughly $156 million in 2024 and another roughly $110 million in 2025. For context, the NFL's highest known dead money charge ever was the Falcons' $40.525 million charge on Matt Ryan in 2022 (via Roster Management System).

OK, what if the Browns wanted to trade Watson next offseason? First of all, they'd have to convince some team to take on the remaining three years and $138 million. But even if they could do that, they'd still take on a dead money hit of right around $63 million in 2024. (But they'd be free and clear after that.)

Those scenarios are basically impossible to imagine. Even if the Browns decided to trade Watson and found a team to take him, they'd surely have to pay a large chunk of the money to facilitate a deal. They're better off keeping him and seeing if he can come back healthy.

So let's move ahead. In 2025, if they wanted to cut him, they'd owe him $92 million in cash and take a dead money hit of roughly $137 million. (A post-June 1 cut would be about $110 million in dead money in 2025 and about $64 million dead money in 2026.) A trade in the 2025 offseason would result in a dead money hit of roughly $45 million. That's a potential out, right? If he plays well enough in 2024 that some team decides he's worth $46 million per year for two years, the Browns could deal him then and swallow $45 million in cap charges. The 2025 cap should be well over $250 million, so that number wouldn't be as difficult as it would have been in the past.

The 2026 numbers, for nerds like me who might care: about $73 million in dead money (including $46 million in cash) if released, about $64 million in dead money (plus that $8.984 million on the 2027 cap) if a post-June 1 release and about $27 million in dead money if traded.

The upshot? The Browns are stuck with him through 2024 for sure, and the only way they could reasonably escape the deal in 2025 is with a trade and a $45 million dead cap hit. So there's a pretty, pretty good chance Watson is still in Cleveland for at least two more years, if not the full three.

Oh, and all of these future cap hit projections assume the Browns don't have to restructure the deal for cap space again like they did this past offseason. And they absolutely might.

It means that unless Watson leads them to a Super Bowl title in one of the final three years of the deal, this has a good chance to go down as the worst trade and/or the worst signing in NFL history.

The size and intractability of Watson's deal will force the Browns to make a lot of difficult decisions in the coming years about other players' contracts. It will be very tough for them to sign impact free agents and retain their own. They will have to draft extremely well to keep the team strong around him -- and remember, Houston has their 2024 first- and fourth-round picks as a result of the Watson trade.

What Watson's contract means is that he has to perform as one of the top quarterbacks in the league and be the type of player who elevates the talent around him. The Browns won't always be able to provide him with the kind of stacked defense they have this season. And they won't always be able to pay their No. 1 wide receiver $20 million, which is what Amari Cooper makes.

Factoring in contract extensions signed since March 2022, there are currently six NFL quarterbacks with average annual salaries higher than Watson's $46 million. He could be outside the top-10 highest-paid quarterbacks by this time next year. But the contracts of players like Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Hurts, Jackson and Joe Burrow offer their teams easier avenues for cap relief via restructure than Watson's rigid deal offers the Browns. He may not actually be one of the 10 highest-paid quarterbacks for much longer, but he will absolutely have to play like one if he's going to get the Browns where they want to go.

Well, it's not like Watson's fully guaranteed deal started a trend, right?

Since that deal was signed, Kyler Murray, Russell Wilson, Hurts, Jackson, Burrow and Justin Herbert have all done extensions. Mahomes did a restructure to get his salary in line with the top of the market. None got fully guaranteed deals. Most didn't even try. Teams have made it clear they don't want to do deals that are structured like Watson's, and it's hard to see that changing any time soon if the top-end quarterbacks aren't going to make the effort to change it.

That said, the next time a quarterback (or any player) goes to a team asking for a fully guaranteed deal, Watson's contract will be one of the prime examples cited in the pushback. It's a five-year deal, and through the first two years he has been a part-time participant and a disappointing, unreliable performer. Much the same way teams use examples such as Todd Gurley as reasons not to pay out big deals to running backs, you can be sure teams will use Watson as a reason not to guarantee money to quarterbacks. Too much can go wrong, they will say, and full guarantees don't give teams enough flexibility to react when things inevitably do go wrong.

If Watson had played two full years as a top quarterback on a playoff team and Super Bowl contender, those seeking fully guaranteed deals might have been able to make a stronger case. But if anyone was hoping Watson would perform at a level that justified asking for full guarantees in the future, they've been as disappointed as the Browns have been.