And if the cut their QB the dead money will take up 63% of their cap next year.
He’s basically already occupying dead cap while being on the field.
There’s too much of the conventional wisdom that he’s taking up too much money not to play.
That’s just the sunken cost fallacy. It won’t feel good for anybody involved but at some point, they just have him occupy a roster spot for the next 2 years to minimize the cap hit and make do until they’re out from under that contract.
Choices have consequences. There are too many owners who think think they can make these sorts of boneheaded decisions without dealing with the years of fallout if/when they don’t work out. If Watson had been the QB he was in Houston, there would be grousing but they would still come up looking smart. Well, he isn’t the QB he was in Houston, so they have to deal with looking like fools.
I can only imagine the calculus is something like this:
- This team will be awful with or without Watson. A passable QB might make them closer to .500, but unless they sneak into the playoffs (highly unlikely) that just hurts their draft spot.
- Watson playing terribly can’t make the owner/front office look any stupider than they already do, and there is some minuscule, but non-zero, chance that he has a few good games.
- There is also some small, but non-zero chance that he gets injured in a way that lets them get some insurance money to offset their losses. Won’t help their cap situation, but at least makes the owner some money.
It’s pretty gross to think that item 3 enters into their thinking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
Actually, I just read the cap implications of Watson’s restructuring, and it’s even worse than I thought. The Browns basically can’t sign anybody meaningful until 2027. So I think it’s actually more #1 - the team is worse with Watson playing and being worse (to get better draft picks) is better.
Sucks for their few decent players… poor Myles Garrett. The Browns should really look at trading him. I see the Lions just lost a pass rusher…
Both are like a majority of NFL starting QBs: capable of playing well at times and capable of sucking at times. It’s just a matter of timing and the situation around them.
And, like a majority of NFL starting QBs, they’ll generally revert to their mean over time. Foles was great … for 2 playoff games in 2018. Wentz was great … for a few games in 2017 and 2018. But both regressed back to their mean over time. And their means were slightly worse than average NFL QBs.
I think it’s worse than this. He wasn’t the QB he used to be even before he left Houston. It’s not like he was an elite talent whose legal problems were a PR nightmare and suspensions kept him off the field where he would have been great; instead he was a promising young QB who looked to be a future top player who declined before ever getting there. I don’t know if his time not playing football ruined him, or the stresses that came with the off-the-field issued broke him, or he just peaked early. But he was already not what he used to be.
This wasn’t like Aaron Rodgers going to the Jets and not being who he was in Green Bay, it was like Russell Wilson going to the Broncos and being as bad as he was the last couple of years in Seattle. Which is what made the trade even more confounding.
I’m not entirely sure about this take on it. I can’t say that I am highly familiar with how well he played in 2020 (his final year playing for Houston), compared to his previous years, but looking at his stats on Pro Football Reference, he still seemed to look pretty good in 2020:
- 70% completions
- 8.9 yards per attempt, and led the league in passing yardage
- Only a 1.3% interception rate
- 90 rushing attempts, for a 4.9 yard average
But, that’s just me looking at aggregated stats; I suppose that, if one actually watched his play over his four seasons with the Texans, one might have seen him showing signs of decline that year.
What’s bizarre about that season is that Houston was coming off back-to-back playoff appearances and Watson led the league in passing in 2020. But the Texans finished 4-12.
It was a bit bazaar and I can’t remember why. They did have a lot of close games so it could have been bad luck or for some reason failing to be clutch on important plays.
Passing yards is not necessarily a sign of a good offence or a good QB, a poor team are often passing because they are behind and do not want toe clock to run. Sam Howell had a lot ofyards last season because the commands passed on so many plays.
Passing more however means the defence are expecting the pass so are able to intercept or at least force an incomplete pass mor of the time but in 2020 Watson had his highest completion percent and lowest number of interceptions.
Interestingly the Browns also have the 2019 Pass leader on their books (Jameis Winston)
Watson didn’t really have a dropoff in 2020, so I’m not sure where that came from.
In 2020, the team around him was not great. This was in the midst of that ridiculous Jack Easterby nonsense when he convinced the powers that be to trade DeAndre Hopkins (!) to Arizona before the season started, among other players, traded a fortune (2! first rounders plus more) for Laremy Tunsil, and then fired Bill O’Brien 4 or 5 weeks into the season and they finished with Romeo Crennel as the interim coach before wasting the next couple seasons before finally cleaning house. There aren’t a lot of QBs able to pull wins from thin air with that sort of dysfunction going on behind the scenes.
Consensus was he got those stats despite the team around him. Better front office (basically boot Easterby) that doesn’t make those insane deals and trades and they would have been playoff contenders for a few more years.
We see the result of that now after a few terrible years, after which Caserio finally got some draft picks to work with, they got rid of Easterby, which allowed them to pick up a decent coach, and there’s the core of a promising team now.
I had to laugh when the Bills kicker missed a 47 yard FG, wide right. The ghost of Scott Norwood still haunts Bills kickers.
You may recall that Tyler Bass, the Bills kicker, also missed a FG wide right in the playoffs last year against the Chiefs. It would have tied the game with less than two minutes left. Instead, KC got the ball and ran out the clock.
And speaking of missed field goals, the Jets kicker, Greg Zuerlein, missed two attempts, with both misses hitting the left upright.
Interesting piece of trivia from the weekend, Bears tight end Cole Kmet was used as the team’s emergency long snapper and is the first player to score a TD and then snap for the extra point since 2005.
I’m far too lazy to look this up. Do you have the name of the player who did this in 2005?
It was Mike Bartrum (FYI, I didn’t look it up myself, I saw it on a site that linked to this Tweet).
Based on the Manning cast last night, Belichick wouldn’t go to the Jets simply because he just flat out does not like the Jets.
He then became the first player ever to do it twice in a game.