Did the Deshaun Watson contract break the NFL's quarterback market?

The fully guaranteed contract that the Cleveland Browns gave Deshaun Watson has been a fiery subject on social media recently. The discourse surrounding the contract has been all over the map; from the morality of the deal, to whether or not Cleveland created a competitive advantage, and ultimately just publicly shaming the Browns. The one constant has been the moving of the goalposts to avoid the true crux of the issue.

So, did the Browns and general manager Andrew Berry do something wrong by offering Watson a fully guaranteed deal to become their franchise quarterback? Would it have been wrong if they offered the exact same deal to Patrick Mahomes? Or was it just wrong because it was Watson? Is it the money or the morality? Both? Neither?

Did Deshaun Watson's contract break the NFL?

Clearing up the misconceptions

The mouthpieces of the league would lead you to believe that Watson’s deal was the first of its kind. That would be categorically false.

Watson’s deal may be an outlier now because of the total sum of the contract, five years and $230 million, but it is far from the first of its kind. Tight end Ricky Dudley signed a guaranteed deal for $8.8 million back in 1996, although he had to forgo a signing bonus to accomplish it.

But in 2011, with the finalization of the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NFL and the NFLPA fully guaranteed deals have become a much more common occurrence than the media would lead you to believe. In the first year of the agreement, 17 rookies signed guaranteed contracts.

Fully guaranteed contracts are now commonplace for players selected in the first round of the NFL Draft, but because of the salary slotting put in place in the CBA, there is a ceiling for how much a player can make based on where they were drafted. However, due to the language of the CBA, fully guaranteed deals were not limited to rookie contracts.

That's where things got interesting. In 2018, Kirk Cousins signed a three-year deal with the Minnesota Vikings for $84 million, all fully guaranteed. Since the Cousins deal, two quarterbacks other than Watson have signed fully guaranteed contracts, with Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers each signing two-year deals.

Comparing contract structures across the big three

It is no secret that the NFL is king in North America. When compared to Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, the gap in popularity the NFL has gained over the last three decades is staggering.

In 2021, the first round of the NFL Draft drew in more television viewers than any game of the previous NBA Finals, and also more than five of the six previous World Series games.

In 2022, 88 of the top 100 viewed television shows were NFL games. It's a landslide. But despite its chokehold on the attention spans of the viewing audience, the players on the field do not have the same contractual protections as their professional athlete counterparts.

MLB only deals in fully guaranteed contracts, and the overwhelming majority of NBA contracts are fully guaranteed, despite their respective sports having a longer participation window and lower risk for serious injury.

Out of the nearly 2,000 players who were under contract at some point in 2022, only 112 players had fully guaranteed contracts. As a whole the NFL is most profitable league in the world, generating a revenue of 17.19 billion dollars (with a capital B) in 2022, and have five of the ten most valuable franchises in North America.

So why is there a severe disconnect between the .06% of fully guaranteed deals and the league’s insane popularity and their ability to just print money?

The league’s high stake game of Three-Card Monte

The NFL is no different than any other institution of mass influence. If you follow the money, you will more times than not find the motivation for one’s actions. The league and its owners want the perception to be that Watson did not deserve the first large-scale fully guaranteed contract because of his off-the-field indiscretions and that the Browns were in the wrong for offering it to him.

Other owners, and by proxy, the league’s mouthpieces want to muddy the fan’s perceptions of the league’s stance on guaranteed contracts and keep the real issue anything but. Owners want to paint the narrative that Watson’s contract should in no way set the precedent for the quarterback market and that Cleveland is an outlier for offering it. When in fact, the NFL is the outlier for not guaranteeing contracts, to begin with.

Ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you watch the NFL for the competition taking place on the field between world-class athletes, or do you watch the NFL to catch glimpses of a team’s owner sitting in their luxury suites? Given what the players sacrifice on the altar for athletic glory and our entertainment, should they not be financially compensated with guaranteed contracts?

If you bought season tickets to watch your favorite team play, are you able to just stop going to games and quit paying if the team is not living up to expectations? Of course not, you are locked in for the full amount regardless of outcomes. The owners just don’t want to have their cake and eat it too, they want that and to own the bakery. Just follow the money.

The vilification of the Cleveland Browns

All morality aside, the league is angry with the Browns for opening the flood gates. But the reality is if it wasn’t the Browns it was going to be someone else. The NFL is a have and have not league. Either you have a franchise quarterback, or you are desperately searching for one.

Whether or not you agree with Watson being their choice is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is the Browns saw an opportunity to secure the services of a true franchise quarterback who is just entering their prime athletic years and moved heaven and Earth to make it happen. Quarterback is inarguably the most pivotal position in all of professional sports, and in this day and age it is virtually impossible to win a Superbowl without one.

Did Cleveland create a competitive advantage by having the liquid assets to put into escrow to guarantee Watson’s contract? Perhaps. But their prime objective was to obtain Watson’s services, any additional stress that puts on other ownerships is just an added byproduct of their actions.

In fact, it would be organizational malpractice to operate in a way that did not give your team an advantage. The Browns have been operating in a deficit since they re-entered the league in 1999, and trading and signing Watson to a fully guaranteed deal was just them attempting to level the playing field.

Enter the Lamar Jackson saga

The main reason that Watson’s fully guaranteed contract with the Browns is in the crosshairs of the media, is because it is allegedly the sticking point for Lamar Jackson getting a deal done with the Baltimore Ravens. Jackson wants the fully guaranteed deal, and Baltimore does not want to give it to him. Rubber meets road.

Baltimore feels so strongly about it, that they gave Jackson the non-exclusive franchise tag and are letting the former MVP shop himself around the league. Only time will tell if another team, or better yet an owner, cares more about winning than they do their standing in the old Billionaire’s Club and offers the fully guaranteed contract that Jackson is seeking.

But one excuse that does not factor into Baltimore’s standoff with Jackson is the narrative that Cleveland’s ability to set money aside in escrow gave them an advantage. According to Forbes, Ravens’ owner Steve Biscotti has a net worth of $6.4 billion and Browns' owner Jimmy Haslam has a net worth $4.8 billion. If the Ravens’ believed that Jackson was worth north of $230 million, they could easily afford it.

The fact that they are letting Jackson test the market before deciding whether or not to match an offer tells you what they believe internally about the quarterback’s long-term trajectory. Blaming the Browns for making their negotiations difficult is their way to disguise the fact that they don't believe that Jackson is worth a fully guaranteed deal. At the end of the day, you are worth what someone is willing to pay you.

Behind Jackson, there are quarterbacks like Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert, who both play for teams that notoriously don't throw around large contracts, waiting in the pipeline to begin negotiating their contracts. If their current teams refuse to offer them a fully guaranteed deal, best believe there are teams out there that will trip over themselves to get them under contract.

So, did Deshaun Watson’s contract break the NFL?

No. Watson’s contract is breaking the chokehold that the NFL’s owners had on the way the league’s contracts were structured. In three years, Watson’s contract will be looked at as a steal, and in 10 years fully guaranteed contracts will be the norm and not an outlier. Guaranteed contracts will be the cost of doing business in the NFL, and the franchises that do not conform will be left by the wayside.