The NFL is ultimately an entertainment business. Many years ago, a group of wealthy individuals stumbled upon a golden goose when they placed the intoxicating game of football in various cities across the country. For many of these franchises, the cities adopted the team as their own and began supporting them with their wallets. More importantly, they developed a vested interest.
That's why folks often joke that football fans are rooting for laundry. Football's not an individualistic sport like basketball or baseball, where fans often root for a specific player and follow them from team to team a la LeBron James or Shohei Ohtani. It's a team game that has become irrevocably ingrained within the community in which it was born.
Fans of each NFL team have to exercise varying degrees of compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance when it comes to controversial players, coaches or executives of their favorite team. At the end of the day, those people are temporary — it's the laundry that will (hopefully) live on forever.
This very concept has been lost in the outrage expressed at Browns fans cheering for... the Browns.
Browns fans deserve to cheer for their team regardless of Deshaun Watson's past
Let's say you make a major purchase such as a home or a car. As time passes, you come to regret the decision due to varying circumstances and wish you never made it. As a rational adult, you eschew setting it ablaze and the criminal arson charges that come with it, and instead maturely go through the process of moving on, even if it takes some time.
That's precisely where the Browns are with Deshaun Watson.
By now, everyone knows the Watson story. He was accused by more than two dozen women who alleged sexual misconduct during massage therapy sessions, and eventually settled many of the civil cases brought against him. The Browns shamelessly pursued him anyway, and paid a ransom to the Houston Texans for the privilege of his quarterbacking services.
That was four years ago. In the subsequent seasons, the Browns have gone 7-10, 11-6, 3-14, and 5-12. The lone playoff season came due to a made-for-television run by veteran quarterback Joe Flacco. Watson was injured, as he's often been since arriving in Cleveland, and the Browns took Flacco in off the couch. He subsequently led them to the playoffs on a magical run fans will not soon forget.
In other words, Watson's tenure has been an abject disaster. Browns fans have sat through mind-numbing loss after loss as the team dealt with the fallout of a massive swing and a miss. If it wasn't difficult enough for fans to accept the baggage that came with Watson, his performance made him persona non grata in Cleveland.
Ahead of the 2026 season, the Browns moved on from the head coach who welcomed Watson to town, a mild-mannered company man in Kevin Stefanski. As his replacement, they hired his polar opposite in Todd Monken, a swashbuckling outlaw with a colorful vocabulary and the bravado to match. While few outside of Monken himself believed in the hire, he has the Browns sitting at 3-1 — and a lot of prognosticators eating crow.
It appears as though the NFL-viewing world didn't mind the Browns when they were losing, but now that they seem to be becoming something, the pitchforks are out. It's not hard to find rival fans finger-wagging at the Browns' fan base for cheering for Watson as he led the Browns to victories over the Carolina Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers in back-to-back weeks. That's where the hypocrisy becomes too much to handle.
Cheering for Deshaun Watson isn't the same as condoning his past
For starters, cheering for the quarterback of an NFL team — regardless of his history — will never be an endorsement of every action in his life. In that moment, fans are cheering for Deshaun Watson, the Cleveland Brown. They're not whitewashing his history or condoning what he's been accused of.
They're cheering because their favorite team is winning. It's all about the laundry.
Furthermore, the Browns are not the only team that has employed a player with a troubling history. In fact, every single team has had a player (or 10) with a checkered past. It doesn't make any crime a player has been accused of acceptable or invisible. It just means fans of every franchise have learned to separate an individual player from the team as a whole.
The Browns have 53 players on their active roster, another 16 on their practice squad, and 10 players on reserve lists. That's 79 guys working their tails off to achieve their dreams and bring a winner to Cleveland. They also have more than a dozen coaches. Should fans ignore the efforts of all those individuals because of accusations levied against one? That seems like a pretty easy "no."
Ultimately, this is bigger than Deshaun Watson. Fans are entitled to their own opinion on the player and the person. However, the Cleveland Browns as a team will always be above any individual. NFL fandom becomes embedded into the fabric of fans' lives. To ask them to throw that all away because of one player is not only obtuse, but ignorant.
Some players are immortalized because of their achievements on the field. Others made an indelible mark on the community. For the vast majority of them, though, they're enlisted to do a job for a short time before everyone moves on with their lives. The Cleveland Browns are 3-1, and the fan base deserves to bask in it.
It's time for folks to stop making it about Deshaun Watson and instead make it about a sleeping giant that may finally be awakening for the first time in a long time.
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