Let's be honest: Deshaun Watson has been a bad move for the Cleveland Browns. He received too much guaranteed money from the Cleveland Browns in a trade that many teams would not have pulled off because of Watson's alleged off-field issues. But the Browns have not been to a Super Bowl in forever, so the team needed to do something.
To make matters worse, Watson has not been good on the field since he arrived in Cleveland. That is when he has been healthy enough to play, and that has not been overly often. For various reasons, he has not played more than seven games in any of his three seasons with the Browns. He won't play much, if at all, in 2025, either, after tearing his Achilles during the 2024 season.
The good news is that Watson would cost a lot less to release after the 2025 season. If he were released this offseason, the team would carry $135,394,566 in dead cap. Next offseason, that number drops to $53,712,888. That is a ridiculous number, of course, but it's less than Russell Wilson from the Denver Broncos' money.
Things don't look good for the Cleveland Browns to trade for Kirk Cousins
But who might replace Watson, at least for next season? The team signed Kenny Pickett to a one-year deal this offseason with a team option for a second season. He ideally would be nothing more than a backup. In a perfect situation, the team would trade or draft a quarterback to replace Watson and Pickett, but one trade option might now be off the table.
According to Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com, any chance of current Atlanta Falcons quarterback Kirk Cousins coming to the Browns is nearly non-existent. This means, Cleveland football fans, that Kenny Pickett, who has a career record of 14-10 as a starting quarterback and notoriously small hands, will probably be the starting quarterback of your Browns.
Cabot wrote in an article about the Cousins and Pickett (and yes, Watson) situation, "If the Browns don’t land Kirk Cousins — and it’s probably unlikely at this point because of all the variable and financial considerations involved — Pickett moves into place as the veteran bridge even though he’s started only 25 games, going 14-10 with the Steelers and 1-0 with the Eagles last season."
Of course, Pickett is a former first-round draft pick (2022) who has a career completion percentage of 62.4 and a quarterback rating of 79.3. That sounds not great until one realizes that Watson's completion percentage as a Brown is 61.2, and his quarterback rating with Cleveland is 80.7. This means the Browns would probably be no worse with Pickett than they would with Watson.
The real problem is that the team would likely be much better off, at least in the next couple of years, with Cousins than either of the other two quarterbacks. The pipe dream of adding Cousins at this point seems to be just that, though.