The Browns got the pest they deserved

Jimmy Haslam's two-bit scheme would have worked if only Deshaun Watson wasn't a broken-down bum who gets chilly in 65-degree weather.

Deshaun Watson showing the number of wins the Browns will have in 2024 [picture via @Browns]

Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, who, in my opinion, should reside in a federal prison cell, had a simple plan in March 2022.

He would simply erase over two decades of franchise ineptitude by trading for a disgruntled sex pest who had been credibly accused of sexually assaulting at least 24 massage therapists that he courted through Instagram direct messages.

The Browns made the play for Watson despite ostensibly drafting a franchise quarterback, Baker Mayfield, with the No. 1 overall selection in the 2018 NFL Draft.

In typical Browns fashion, the move blew up in their face.

From Nate Ulrich of The Akron Beacon Journal in 2022:

The Browns have been informed they are out of the running for Watson, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to the USA TODAY Network. The person spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. Watson has a no-trade clause in his contract, and he decided he won't waive it for Cleveland. 

The Browns were willing to accept whatever public backlash would have come from making Watson the face of their franchise because owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam believe the quarterback is capable of leading Cleveland to its first Super Bowl.

It’s worth remembering that the Browns weren’t the only suitors of the then-26-year-old Watson. The New Orleans Saints, Carolina Panthers and Atlanta Falcons were also in the mix.

What you’ll notice about those teams is that they play in domes or, in Carolina’s case, a moderate coastal climate.

Watson hails from Atlanta. He played collegiately at Clemson. He played in a dome with his first NFL team, the Houston Texans.

If the Browns were a competently owned franchise, they might have considered the ramifications of Watson never having to play or even live in cold weather regularly.

Or maybe that, after Watson rejected their flirtations, he only considered warm or moderate climates.

Instead, the Browns reacted like a pimply-faced teenager dumped a week before prom by a girl upon whom they had naively projected a lifetime of marital bliss or at least a hand job in the Burger King parking lot after the big dance.

The Browns doubled down on their illusion of grandeur and offered Watson a $230 million, fully guaranteed contract.

And in that regard, the Browns’ lethal mix of traditional stupidity and horniness for a championship quarterback was unique. If it wasn’t, that no other suitor dared match their offer might have been another red flag in the proceedings.

Alas! I guess we’ll never know.

Instead, we got a depraved press conference featuring Browns’ much-ballyhooed Ivy League-educated brain trust in general manager Andrew Berry and head coach Kevin Stefanski.

The two smartest men in the room assured the simpletons in the media that they had “done the homework” required to sign a quarterback who showed zero remorse for any of the actions that would lead to him paying millions of dollars in civil settlements.

Three losers of a feather, flocking together [via YouTube].

Even ol’ Slippin Jimmy Haslam, who, again, should have already been in federal prison for defrauding his customers in a previous business venture, used his wife and daughter’s gender as a shield to defend the signing.

“This has been a really hard and difficult journey for us and our family,” Dee Haslam told The Akron Beacon Journal after the signing.

“We spent a lot of time and a lot of evenings spending time with our daughters and working through this as a family. I have to tell you it was really hard, and we had to work really hard to get comfortable with the decision.

“We knew going in this was going to be really hard on the individuals and trigger emotions from individuals that had been through sexual abuse. I just have to tell you our compassion for those individuals is really deep. We know how hard this has been on them.”

These self-pitying, empty quotes are the things you can get away with when you’re as rich as the Haslams. “Sweet Dee,” who, it must be said, is just as awful as the man she married, knows exactly how that quote looks and how it reads.

She also knows that, outside of that one uncomfortable moment, she’d never have to speak on the deal at length ever again.

In that regard, the Haslams’ calculus was simple.

They knew there would be a firestorm when they signed Watson, but they also knew that winning has a funny way of people forgetting stuff like the testimony of Jane Doe #16 (emphasis mine):

At the spa, Watson immediately got naked and laid face-down on the table.

When massaging around his buttocks, Watson told the plaintiff not to be scared and to "go deeper". She declined. After this, Watson flipped over and exposed his penis. Watson told her to massage his groin and then brushed his penis up against her, which terrified plaintiff.

Watson told her not to be afraid to "touch him". She told him that she was not being paid to do that. Watson then responded that it was what he paid for. She declined and quickly ended the massage.

She said Watson only paid one-third of what he owed.

In the Haslams’ defense (a string of words I’ll never use again unless under duress), they were correct in that calculus.

The Washington Commanders recently suspended their “vice president of content” after he got caught in an undercover media sting saying, among other unsavory things, that the franchise’s fans were primarily high-school-educated, mouth-breathing alcoholics.

That’s probably not far from how the Haslams (and most NFL executives) view their diehard fans, who continue to line their pockets with hard-earned money no matter the quality of the product they put on the field—year after year, miserable season after season.

I would know. I used to be one of those lost souls who let the Browns become a much more significant part of my personality than any rational God ever intended.

Operating under the alias “Baby Billy,” I traveled to Santa Clara, California, to watch the Browns get destroyed in primetime in 2019. While it’s easy to romanticize my so-called midlife crisis tour, which took me coast to coast following the Browns. But in reality, I was using my fandom to mask my terminal alcoholism. You can see it on my face in that picture, and it would have sent me to an early grave if I continued down that road.

People like the Haslams can't fathom caring about anything that doesn’t actively make them money. It’s the same kind of contempt that every drug dealer has for their customers.

But the Haslams were right in that, had they gotten the type of quarterback in Watson for whom they thought they traded, Browns fans would have circled the wagons and had anyone who broke ranks executed in the Muni Lot.

Had we won a Super Bowl by now, there would already be another problematic statue outside the stadium that the Haslams are actively trying to abandon.

The NFL, after clearly being uncomfortable highlighting Watson in his first season in Cleveland, in which he served an 11-game suspension for gross and repeated sexual misconduct, would have gladly pimped the “redemption” arc for Watson in the following seasons if he finally led a hapless franchise like the Browns to glory.

After all, wouldn’t Browns fans have deserved to see their perverted criminal owner touch the Vince Lombardi Trophy so he could break to other pervert criminals at the league’s winter meeting in whatever vampire cave they had chosen that year?

Sure, Browns fans aren’t unique in that regard. Every other fan base in our situation would have done the same thing. That part isn’t debatable.

But thankfully, back in reality, there’s still a sliver of proof that an angry God exists, and He’s not about to let the Browns cut corners to the Super Bowl by signing a brittle sex pest who thinks 65 degrees is “a bit chilly.”

Yesterday, after Browns players laughably mingled with drunken fans in the Muni Lot in the hours before kickoff—again, something that I would have eaten like dog food like the drunken mark I was a mere three years ago—the Dallas Cowboys stomped a mudhole in their asses as fans loudly booed Watson and the Browns as they walked into the locker room at half time.

Watson, playing his first game nearly a year after shoulder reconstruction surgery, finished the contest by completing 24 of 45 passes for 169 yards, with a six-yard touchdown pass and two interceptions.

He also surrendered six sacks.

The trainwreck was easy to see coming. I said as much in a typo-ridden screed I wrote the day after the trade in 2022, most likely after imbibing too much Tito’s Handmade Vodka to legally operate heavy machinery, but thankfully not a blog post.

Granted, I didn’t predict Watson going to Saudi Arabia to sports-wash a murderous, tyrannical regime deeply connected to the 9-11 attacks—but maybe I should have. He has indeed proven to be one of the most diabolical figures in sports, which is something I don’t say lightly.

The rest of the article, however, holds strong. I don’t regret putting my Browns regalia in storage. I don’t regret boycotting attending games.

The Browns are getting precisely what they deserve when it comes to Watson. And yet, even though I held my coveted moral high ground on most fans, I couldn’t evade the franchise’s stench while laughing at their season-opening implosion.

“It’s a franchise of losers from top to bottom,” I explained to my disinterested stepson, who is apparently a lot smarter than me. “The owner is a criminal who should (in my opinion) be in prison.

“The general manager is a Harvard-educated loser who is only good at Excel spreadsheets.

“The head coach is aging like a president, and he’s committed almost as many war crimes. The social media team should get real jobs instead of running propaganda for a franchise of criminals.

“The fans in the stands are losers, too, for expecting this year to be any different than the last 23 that ended in crushing disappointment.

“But make no mistake,” I said. “I’m the biggest loser of all for spending a beautiful fall Sunday even contemplating this stain on America.”

In retrospect, Art Modell did Cleveland a favor when he moved the team. We Browns fans, in typical fashion, were just too stupid to understand the gift given to us, which is why we deserve to be condemned to watch the Zombie Browns’ Sisyphean struggle against respectability ever since.

Thankfully, the crooked Haslam family seems intent on moving the team to an industrial wasteland in the suburbs to play in a building that looks like the product of a Cybertrucking fucking an Amazon warehouse.

The predictable suspects within the fanbase seem content with fawning over that set of shiny new jingling keys.

I can only shake my head and hope they come to their senses like I did. Because, in my sobriety, I’ve come to realize that dying broke in a gutter would have been more honorable than following that gang of stooges around in a futile pursuit of gridiron glory.

A move to the suburbs, and thus further outside of my consciousness, can’t come soon enough.

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