Cleveland Browns players said all the right things on Wednesday. They headed to the practice field and prepared for Sunday’s still-important game when the Pittsburgh Steelers come to town.
But things have changed, and not for the better. While it’s not a good time to get the news that your starting quarterback will miss the season, this should be the start of the most exciting and dynamic November work week the Browns have had in three years – and perhaps in nearly 25 years.
Instead, it turned into a downright depressing day in and around team headquarters as the Browns announced that quarterback Deshaun Watson would need surgery to repair a broken bone in his throwing shoulder. Surgery is scheduled soon and Watson will not play again this season.
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Browns’ Watson will undergo season-ending surgery
Rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson was announced as this week’s starter by coach Kevin Stefanski. Presumably, Thompson-Robinson is the starter for the rest of the season. But that is not certain, and now nothing is certain. After winning in Baltimore last week, the Browns were alive in the AFC North, the entire AFC playoff race, and were emerging as the type of bully made for high-stakes games in December.
The defense is so good. On Wednesday the general mood was so bad.
Since the Browns’ bye week in early October, four of the five games have come down to the final seconds. With a defense that was dominant in big moments and occasionally impenetrable, the Browns have won four of those five and are now 6-3 and just a half-game out of first place in the division. But the biggest of those wins came last week, and it’s not just because they won at first-place Baltimore. It was the biggest because it was Watson’s first successful rally. Watson completed 14 of 14 passes in the second half, erasing his own nightmarish start and keeping Cleveland in a game in which it trailed by 14 points three times, including with just under 12 minutes left.
It was supposed to be the arrival, the breakthrough, the long-awaited victory, because Watson’s presence and playmaking meant the Browns weren’t buried. Instead, the quarterback is out again 20 months after a trade that included three first-round picks for the right to give Watson a fully guaranteed $230 million contract. He has played 12 games in two years and will not play again this season.
The Browns, who dominated the second half in Baltimore, were real AFC contenders. The Browns with a backup quarterback — or collection of backup quarterbacks — are not. The defense is still stingy and vicious enough to potentially drag Cleveland to the brink of the playoffs and maybe even the first round. But what Cleveland began to build with half a season to go was Watson getting healthy, getting more comfortable and ultimately becoming what this version of the Browns never had.
Reaching the second week of January is still important, and it’s still at least a semi-realistic goal. But the Browns had earned the right to call themselves contenders and be viewed as one of the AFC’s scariest opponents and toughest outs. Winning big games leads to bigger games and validates decisions like the one Cleveland made to center much of its operations around Watson. Without him, this defense and Amari Cooper’s exceptional season seem doomed to be at least partially wasted – or even completely exhausted by the final few games of the season.
In Watson’s six games, the Browns averaged 5.1 yards per play. Without him, they average 4.1 yards per play, which ranks 31st. They were in the middle of the pack offensively in terms of points per drive, although Watson’s return two games ago came with a big jump in points. They are a bottom third team in terms of total expected offensive points. They’ve averaged 151.2 rushing yards in their five games since the bye week, but with the loss of Watson they no longer have their second-most explosive runner. I have no doubt in any way about this offense’s ability to play hard, fight, scratch and claw to get first downs. Other than fighting, scratching and clawing, I just don’t see much of a limit.
The Browns are getting the best version of Cooper in his ninth season. He is averaging a career-best 17.4 yards per reception and a career-best 79.4 yards per game. Their Pro Bowl guards, Joel Bitonio and Wyatt Teller, were rock solid as usual – and occasionally dominant. The offense just completed the first straight weeks of Watson being in practice since September, and based on his performance in most of the last two games, it was likely he would only improve with more reps and opportunities to grow . Watson completed every pass he threw in the second half against the Ravens while playing with a high ankle sprain and a broken bone in his shoulder.
Now the Browns are moving to a rookie quarterback and playing at least one backup offensive tackle — maybe two — against the Steelers. Then they play consecutive away games. Stefanski chose Thompson-Robinson over the turnover-happy but more experienced PJ Walker because he had seen nearly three full games with Walker running the offense. For all their chips this season, the Browns traded veteran backup Joshua Dobbs in August, leaving Thompson-Robinson as their top backup and Walker leading two wins while still on the practice squad. Dobbs has become one of the best stories of the season, and now the Browns must expect their own feel-good story to falter as the games drag on.
Fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson will start in place of the injured Deshaun Watson as the Browns enter a critical period. (Jason Miller/Getty Images)
It’s nice that Thompson-Robinson was Cleveland’s scout team player of the week last week. It’s hard to believe he can give the real Browns’ offense much of a chance against a stout defense over the next two months. The Browns’ schedule — and the awkward circumstances surrounding the team’s plan to play Watson until two hours before kickoff on Oct. 1 — never gave Thompson-Robinson a chance in his first outing. It was unfair to the rookie, which turned into an absolutely exceptional performance for Cleveland.
Thompson-Robinson should benefit from knowing he’s going to start and having a semi-normal preparedness for a full week. He gets better with more repetitions. But he won’t escape trouble or maintain his drive the way Watson did. This week he may have to play with two backup offensive tackles against the Steelers. The Browns will be run-heavy, but even with this defense, they can’t escape reality given this Watson news.
The Browns traded Dobbs because they thought Watson would excel this season and that if he didn’t, they wouldn’t as a team. They didn’t add a veteran passer before the trade deadline despite Watson dealing with a lingering shoulder issue, and even setting aside future uncertainty (for now), it looks more like they made major mistakes in how they designed and reconstructed it made what coaches consider to be the most important space in any football building.
Stefanski has been adaptable (and good!) with his personnel allocations and play calling given the quarterback turnover and the loss of Pro Bowl running back Nick Chubb earlier in the season. But there’s only so much the Browns can continue to embellish. This offense was about Watson combining the exceptional with efficiency and coming through with more experience. This was an offense that still had several weeks to continue to tinker and grow given the struggles early in the season. It was well positioned to undertake this defense until the training wheels could finally be removed.
Now the Browns need several wrenches and screwdrivers on hand. They need better defense than ever, and for longer than ever. Just a few days ago, eight games to play provided a level of excitement and optimism rarely found for a franchise that has gone 6-3 just twice since returning to the league in 1999. In 2020, the Browns found enough answers to navigate the divisional round of the playoffs. This suddenly feels more like 2014, when the Browns went from 6-3 to 7-9.
There’s still time for this defense to prove that thought wrong, but the thought that now – finally – is the time for these Browns seems to be over.
(Top photo of Deshaun Watson: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)