The Cleveland Browns are now less than two weeks away from the start of the 2026 NFL season.
When they take the field on the afternoon of September 13 against the Jacksonville Jaguars, quarterback Deshaun Watson will be leading the offense in his first regular-season game in almost two years.
Of course, missing extended periods of time is nothing new to Watson, a trend he started himself when he sat out the entire 2021 season in a contract dispute with the Houston Texans.
After being traded to the Browns
in 2022, he missed the first 11 games of that season while serving an NFL-mandated suspension, 11 more games in 2023 (shoulder injury), 10 more games in 2024 (torn Achilles tendon), and all 17 games in 2025 (re-tear of same Achilles tendon).
All told, Watson has played in just 19 games in the past five seasons, which is not preferable. Worse, when he did play, he was the definition of not good, with an EPA/dropback of -0.14 in 2022, -0.09 in 2023, and -0.25 in 2024.
What’s more, that number in 2024? It was the lowest of any quarterback in the past two seasons. (The quarterback one spot above Watson? None other than Shedeur Sanders and his horrible rookie season of 2025!)
But we digress.
Anyone who has watched Watson play since arriving in Cleveland knows he is not the same quarterback he was in Houston. And the numbers back up the idea that he will likely never be that quarterback.
There is one person, two if you count Watson, who doesn’t care about that, however, which is head coach Todd Monken.
It’s not that Monken is unfamiliar with Watson’s decline, as Monken has been coaching in the NFL for six of Watson’s eight seasons, including the past three when he was offensive coordinator of the division rival Baltimore Ravens.
But this is Monken’s first year in Cleveland and first time as a head coach in the NFL, so he is taking a “clean slate” approach to Watson (and the rest of the roster), as he explained during his media session on Tuesday:
“I really, to be honest, haven’t looked at it. To be honest, only from afar. When people say, ‘You had to look at it,’ well, not really. I looked at it from afar when I was down the road, in crossover film or something, but I try to take everything at face value, what I see. It doesn’t matter who the player is; I think we owe that to our players, guys that are on the roster.
“I want to go into it thinking every player we have is elite, and all they have to do is prove me right. That’s all they have to do. That’s how I’m going to go into it. They’re on an NFL roster; I expect them to play well, and I just want them to prove me right. So, I really haven’t looked at that – different staff, different system. We’ll let it play out. We’ll see where it goes starting a week from now.”
It is an interesting way to approach the situation. Whether he wants to admit it or not, Watson has to know on some level he has not been the same player since arriving in Cleveland. So having the head coach bring that up all the time is probably not very beneficial.
But there is also some risk involved if Watson continues to play poorly and Monken remains stubborn about accepting that even if he isn’t looking at the past, Watson is done as an upper-tier starting quarterback in the NFL.
Of course, the current quarterback room is void of anyone who is a viable starting quarterback at the NFL level, so even if it takes a few extra weeks for Monken to come to the realization, the Browns haven’t really lost all that much from an on-field perspective.
