The Cleveland Browns are breaking new ground in just how bad a contract can look, courtesy of, naturally, Deshaun Watson.
The mud they dredged up on Thursday: a contract restructure that will see $44.79 million of his salary cap space this season converted to a signing bonus, giving the team $35.83 million in new cap space, according to ESPN’s Field Yates. The move reportedly leaves Cleveland with more than $62 million in cap space, by far the most in the NFL.
Obviously, it’s a little late for them to fill that space, so they will instead roll it over to next year, where they are currently $66 million over the cap, according to OverTheCap. Only the New Orleans Saints ($94 million) have it worse.
Meanwhile, Watson’s salary numbers have become even more eye-popping, an achievement when the original piece of paper was an unprecedented, fully guaranteed $230 million deal for a player awaiting suspension for numerous sexual assault and misconduct accusations. The Browns had already restructured the contract last year, and doing it again leaves Watson with a $72.9 million cap hit for the 2025 and 2026 seasons, plus $26.9 million in void dead cap for 2027.
The NFL has never seen a disaster like Deshaun Watson’s contract
If all of that sounds unsustainable, uh, your ears aren’t wrong.
Financial armageddon is coming for the Browns, who are facing $172 million in dead cap hits if they cut him in 2025 and $99 million in 2026. Considering the record for most dead money incurred is the $85 million the Denver Broncos ate for releasing Russell Wilson, that’s an achievement in itself.
All of this would be approaching acceptable if Watson was the missing piece for a long-awaited Super Bowl, but so far he has looked nowhere close to it. He lost 11 games of his first season in 2022 to the aforementioned suspension, then looked awful upon his return.
The Browns at least posted a 5-1 record in games he played last year, but his stats were again lackluster and injuries left him on the sideline for the majority of the season, while Joe Flacco became a folk hero.
Now entering this third season with the team, Watson is dealing with a shoulder issue after lukewarm reviews in training camp. He simply hasn’t meshed well in Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski’s system, on occasions when he is healthy, but the team is stuck with him.
So the Browns will move on, while hoping the playmaker that starred for the Houston Texans is still in there somewhere.