ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky has been among the national talking heads who have implored Todd Monken and the Cleveland Browns to roll with Shedeur Sanders at quarterback this season. The Browns could field one of the youngest rosters in the NFL, and Deshaun Watson almost certainly won’t be around by this time in 2027 to help celebrate the team's progress.
Cleveland has been planning to release Watson next March with a post-June 1 designation since it reworked his contract in December of 2024. Sanders, meanwhile, is 24 years old, under contract through 2028, and has shown enough growth throughout the offseason to make Monken hesitate to name the more experienced Watson as this year’s starter.
Orlovsky, a former NFL quarterback who does a lot of all-22 breakdowns for ESPN’s morning shows, surprisingly saw enough from Watson in Saturday’s preseason debut at Chicago to deem Cleveland’s quarterback competition “not close.”
“After preseason Week 1 it’s not close, the competition,” Orlovsky said, “and I’ve been pumping Shedeur to be the guy. I thought Deshaun played faster. He saw it cleaner and the ball jumped off his hands a lot more. … [I did] think there were a moment or two of rust, but if you just looked at the snaps as a body of work, Deshaun was clearly better in the game. And even though I’ve been sitting here pounding the table, like ‘Start Shedeur,’ because it makes more sense to start Shedeur, I did not find after preseason Week 1 that it was all that close.”
Dan Orlovsky no longer believes the Browns' quarterback competition is all that close
This take quickly drew the ire of Browns fans on social media, as Watson’s performance against the Bears was as unspectacular as his entire five-year tenure in Cleveland.
Watson’s box score stats looked fine. He completed 11 of his 15 passes for 126 yards and a QB rating of 98.2. But 43 of those yards came on a screen pass to Dylan Sampson. He averaged just 4.4 air yards per attempt and lost a fumble on a fourth-and-2 play in Bears territory.
He was better than Sanders in the game, as Orlovsky’s colleague Dan Graziano agreed, but “not close” feels a little aggressive. We’re talking about a 34-10 preseason loss where the Browns’ collective quarterback play was mostly awful.
What’s probably leading analysts like Orlovsky and Graziano to that conclusion is the overall vibes around Cleveland’s quarterback competition right now. Everyone knows that Watson has been trending toward being named the starter for the regular season opener at Jacksonville. All Saturday’s all-around ugly showing did was maintain the status quo.
We’ve officially reached the point where Sanders’ public advocates are throwing in the towel. But the “competition” continues nonetheless through this week’s preseason home game against the Buffalo Bills.
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