Well, at least the Browns got what they deserved with the pest trade
Entering his fourth season in Cleveland, Watson and his repaired shoulder are battling Shedeur Sanders and Dillion Gabriel for minutes on a garbage team.
It’s been over four years since Crooked Jimmy Haslam and the Cleveland Browns traded for a brittle Southern sex pest named Deshaun Watson.
At the time, Watson had two surgically repaired ACLs and hadn’t played live football in 18 months. But hey, he looked good in YouTube highlights and, at the time, the Browns laughably considered themselves one legitimate quarterback away from being a Super Bowl contender.
Watson originally rebuffed the Browns' overtures on account of him getting chilly in 68-degree weather… as well as the franchise’s historical misfortunes. But Haslam had already envisioned himself touching all over that Lombardi Trophy, so he looked past 22 credible allegations of sexual assault (that were eventually settled out of court) against Watson.
At the time of the trade, Haslam threw the women in his family—”Sweet Dee” Haslam, his wife, and their daughter—under the proverbial bus, saying they were “on board” with the so-called blockbuster.
On March 22, The Rooster announced the Browns Provisional Army.
We are the baddies, now.
The silver lining, however, is the decent chance that Watson, who has not played in over a year, struggles to regain his form of old. His one game in Cleveland, in the year he led the league in passing in 2019, he threw for 168 yards and lost 10-7 to the Browns.
There is a reason he didn’t want to play in a cold-weather town until Haslam drowned him in guaranteed money. But that contract won’t protect him from the elements while playing outdoors on the banks of Lake Erie in December..
If Watson thinks the current circus around his sexual misconduct was hellish, just wait until he fails to perform for the Browns. Our fans will turn on him just like they have on every other stumblebum the franchise put in that position since returning to the league in 1999.
In Watson’s defense, he has avoided the most dire of Lake Erie elements through the ancient art of being perennially injured.
The rest of that take has aged well. But Watson might have become a laughingstock even on Cleveland sports radio—I remember when ESPN’s industry spokesman Adam Schefter reported Watson’s trade.
Had Watson delivered on his end of the bargain, he would be revered by a majority of fans. If he had won a Super Bowl, a crypto-financed statue would already be planned for him in Brook Park.
There was a time—not that long ago, in retrospect—that being a Browns fan was a large part of my personality, which is the political way of saying it was a socially acceptable outlet for my substance abuse disorders.
At the time, I thought it’d be a five- to seven-year boycott. But then Haslam treated our Republican state legislature like a medieval concubine, shaking loose $600 million in Ohioans’ private property to subsidize a new sphincter of a stadium in the suburban wasteland of Brook Park.
Haslam also doubled down by strong-arming a $50 million split between Franklin County and Columbus taxpayers to build a training facility for a new NWSL franchise.
And that’s all on top of his funding reactionary toads and their pet projects to maintain unilateral Republican control over Ohio despite being a part-time resident at best.
And sure, we all have to live under those conditions, but at least we can point and laugh at the Haslam Group paying $230 million to sabotage its already middling franchise for the better part of the next decade.
We can only hope that it’s a taste of what’s to come with the Haslam Group paying $1.2 billion to move their bottom-feeding team to a suburban parking lot next to an airport.
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