Deshaun Watson was coming off his third Pro Bowl season in 2020 and had also just led the league in passing. However, he was engaged in a holdout with the Houston Texans, and dozens of sexual misconduct allegations had then been filed against him. For some reason, this was when the Cleveland Browns decided to roll their dice on the QB, even though they should have looked the other way. And Bill Belichick says other teams should learn from Cleveland’s cautionary tale.
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Cleveland offered the Texans five picks, including three first-rounders, for the QB’s services. While that’s a hefty sum, it’s nothing compared to the albatross of a contract the Browns offered to Watson: a five-year, fully guaranteed $230 million deal, the largest in NFL history.
Needless to say, the trade has not worked out whatsoever. Watson dealt with a lengthy suspension and has also sustained major injuries nearly every season. Even when he has lined up behind the scrimmage line, he has not looked like the Watson we saw in 2020.
On this week’s episode of the Let’s Go podcast, which Belichick hosted alongside a few others, the iconic head coach spoke about the Browns-Watson disaster. He cautioned other teams about engaging in similar deals, and also poked fun at the fact that the Browns handed Watson that deal when they didn’t even need to.
“Look, these situations, I think, are a lesson to the executives and teams in the National Football League… If you throw a lot of money at a player and it doesn’t work out, you could be sitting there looking at 50-60-70 million dollars of dead money on your cap and make it hard to be competitive.”
“That’s 20-30 percent of your cap, that’s a lot, that’s a lot of good football players that you can’t otherwise have on your team. Before you give out those monstrous contracts, you gotta make sure it’s the right guy,” the former head coach added.
Belichick is spot on, as usual. In the four years since the trade, Watson has started just 19 games for Cleveland, going 9-10. Among QBs who threw 550+ passes over that span, he ranked 5th-worst in passer rating (80.7), 3rd-worst in completion percentage (61.2), and 2nd-worst in yards per attempt (6.0).
Watson’s cap hit this year is just over 10 percent of Cleveland’s cap (about $27 million), but in 2025 and 2026, that number jumps to a nutty 27 percent (about $72 million).
As Belichick pointed out, however, the Browns weren’t the only team to fall into this trap. He also mentioned the Denver Broncos and their failed Russell Wilson experiment, as well as the Daniel Jones debacle in New York. The Cowboys, too, find themselves in a similar predicament.
Bill Belichick compared the Dak Prescott deal to Watson’s
The Dallas Cowboys might also have a similar issue on their hands, according to Bill Belichick.
Dak Prescott signed a four-year, $240 million contract prior to the start of the 2024 regular season. It made him the highest-paid player in NFL history in every respect you can imagine. He’s been an elite regular-season QB, but he is just 2-5 in the playoffs. Quarterbacks get paid $60 million to win Super Bowls, so the expectation was that Prescott put them on that track.
Now, with Prescott on injured reserve and the Cowboys at 3-7, the contract is starting to smell a lot like Watson’s, as Belichick pointed out.
“There’s always the injury risk if something were to happen, take a player like Prescott… who’s a very highly-compensated player who’s not going to play the rest of the season. It’s a big loss to the team when you have so much invested in those guys.”
The money being paid to Watson and Prescott is similar, but Prescott has been a much better player over the last four years. The Cowboys signal caller finished second in MVP voting just last year. Dak Prescott is a few years older than Watson, but he’s a much more capable QB than Watson is at this point in his career.
Prescott is still playable, while Watson was likely to be benched before suffering his season-ending injury. The Cowboys will consider this season a write-off and move forward with Prescott and a new coach in 2025, while the Browns will need to start over.
