With football just a week (college) or two (NFL) away, you might have questions about your favorite team’s quarterback, or offense, or defense, or coaching staff heading into 2022.
My question: What do you do when the quarterback of your favorite team is Deshaun Watson?
Longtime readers of this space know I’m a Cleveland Browns fan. It’s in the blood. My grandmother and Blanton Collier were first cousins. I grew up watching the Browns every Sunday during football season. I have a framed photograph of Collier’s 1970 team, his last as head coach, signed by the coach himself — “To John Clay, from his cousin, Blanton Collier” — hanging in my office.
But what do you do when your favorite team, the one you’ve supported for decades, does something so controversial, so egregious you’re not sure you can still support that team?
I’m not talking about losing. The Browns have lost for years. It’s their thing. I started following Cleveland in the 1960s, when they were among the NFL’s top franchises, one that had never had a losing season. Six decades later the Browns are one of the few franchises that never made it to the Super Bowl. And I never wavered.
The Watson saga is different, however. This is sexual misconduct, something Watson was accused of committing by over two dozen women. In the New York Times, Jenny Vrentas reported that Watson met with at least 66 women for massages over a 17-month period. NFL players just don’t do that. Their body is their livelihood. Why would they trust it to so many people they don’t even know?
Judge Sue L. Robinson found those accusations credible. The independent arbiter, agreed to by the NFL and NFL Players Association, ordered a six-game suspension for the Browns’ quarterback. The NFL appealed the ruling, asking the suspension be lengthened to one season. Last week, the NFL and Watson’s representatives agreed to an 11-game suspension with a $5 million fine.
The suspension is settled, wrote sports legal expert Andrew Brandt for Sports Illustrated, but “the stench will linger.”
One reason: Watson’s contract. When the Houston Texans granted Watson the right to negotiate a trade for himself, the Browns didn’t just award Watson a lucrative contract, they made him the highest-paid player in the NFL. The five-year, $230 million contract is all guaranteed, the first in the history of the league. There is something wrong about Watson, as Brandt put it, “profiting off his own misconduct.”
On Thursday, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam said, “We strongly believe he (Watson) deserves a second chance. We gave (running back) Kareem Hunt a second chance and that worked out pretty well.”
I’m for second chances, too, when a person shows remorse or asks forgiveness for his actions. Watson hasn’t done that. “I’ll continue to stand on my innocence, just because you know settlements, and things like that happen doesn’t mean that a person is guilty for anything,” he said Thursday. “I feel like a person has an opportunity to stand on his innocence and prove that, and we proved that from a legal side, and just going to continue to push forward as an individual and as a person.”
I’m not naive to think that every Brown has been a saint over the years. I heard Joe Thomas, the Browns’ former star offensive tackle, say he will judge Watson on what he does moving forward. And a friend, another longtime Browns fan, told me there are plenty of players worth rooting for in that Cleveland locker room. Watson is one player on what will be a 53-man team.
He’s the most important player, however. The quarterback. The face of the franchise for the team that has been “my” team for so long.
Are they still “my” team? That’s the question. I’m much too much of a football fanatic to ignore the NFL. I’ll still follow the Cleveland Browns. But with Deshaun Watson at quarterback, and given what the Browns did to make him their quarterback, it won’t be the same. It can’t be the same.
