PHOENIX — The Cleveland Browns have spent their time at the luxurious Arizona Biltmore this week working diligently to make two things abundantly clear: They aren’t interested in trading Myles Garrett, and Deshaun Watson is absolutely a viable contender to win back the starting quarterback job from Shedeur Sanders.
I don’t believe those conversations should be mutually exclusive. There is, or at least should be, a through line between the quarterback conversation and Garrett’s fate in Cleveland.
To be clear, I wrote after Garrett’s historic extension last year that the Browns should’ve traded him and nothing that has transpired in the year since has changed my mind. It would’ve been complicated cap gymnastics, but depending on the timing, a deal was doable. Their recent restructuring of Garrett’s contract makes it even more feasible to deal him despite their protests the last few days that they aren’t interested.
Nevertheless, the exhaustive search to fix the quarterback position yet again has to be the most important priority for this organization until it actually occurs. Nothing else, not even retaining Garrett, comes close.
Owner Jimmy Haslam said Monday at the league meetings that he could build the case for Garrett being the best player in the NFL. He’s not wrong.
“Guys like Myles Garrett do not come along very much,” Haslam said. “He is a unicorn. And Myles is an integral part of what we do.”
Yet despite Garrett playing the best football of his career, the Browns have won eight games the last two years with him on the roster. His dominance just hasn’t impacted winning to the level of a franchise quarterback — he had five sacks at New England last season and the Browns lost by 19.
Put another way, the Dallas Cowboys moved Micah Parsons for a veteran defensive tackle and two first-round picks. The Cowboys went 7-10 in Parsons’ last season in Dallas. They were 7-9-1 this year without him.
No example better illustrates an elite edge rusher’s lack of impact on winning with little around him than Parsons’ and Garrett’s presence on bad teams.
Elite edge rushers like those two are an incredible piece to drop into a team ready to contend, such as the Packers did in acquiring Parsons. The Packers believed they could win a Super Bowl with him, and indeed, their winning percentage increased from .647 in 2024 to .731 with him last season before Parsons tore an ACL in December. The guts of their team were already established.
That isn’t where the Browns are, which is illustrated by how Haslam and general manager Andrew Berry lavished praise on Watson in recent days after Haslam at these meetings last year called the trade to acquire him a “big swing and miss.”
Watson has appeared in just 19 games over the first four years of the contract. He needed shoulder surgery, tore an Achilles twice and was suspended 11 games for sexual misconduct when he first arrived. The trade has been a debacle but the Browns refuse to give up and believe new coach Todd Monken might be able to get more out of him. Whether that’s belief in magic beans or reality remains to be seen considering Watson’s inability to stay healthy.
“Deshaun has a great chance, fresh start, offensive-minded coach who has, in his past, been able to work with all kinds of different quarterbacks and make them successful,” Haslam said. “So Deshaun has a great chance to do that now.”
If it sounds to you like the Browns want Watson to win the starting job, you’re not alone. That’s the impression I was left with following a few days in the desert.
The Browns seem to invent new ways to infuriate their fan base every year. Trotting Watson back onto the field might be their magnum opus, unless he miraculously finds a way to play well again. The odds are certainly against him.
The question is whether playing Watson reflects a belief in him returning to MVP-caliber form — something he hasn’t been in six years — or is it an indictment of the lack of belief in Sanders?
Berry has long maintained the head coach needs to be able to pick his quarterback and reiterated this weekend that Monken will have final say on who starts with no interference from the organization. Haslam, meanwhile, dismissed the idea that Sanders’ rabid fan base and marketability will play a role in the decision.
“I assure you (Monken) is going to go on who can win the most games,” Haslam said.
If the Browns believed they found their franchise quarterback in Sanders, retaining Garrett makes perfect sense. They have given no indication, either publicly or privately, that’s the case. Berry even floated the idea this weekend of signing Watson to another contract should he play well this year, an idea so outrageous that it can only be surpassed by the Browns’ brief flirtation with trying to convince the NFL’s competition committee to change the rules allowing teams to trade draft picks up to five years out. The Browns quickly pulled the item from discussion Monday morning when they realized they had little support.
“There’s zero chance it gets through,” Rams coach Sean McVay, a member of the competition committee, said Monday about an hour before the proposal was pulled.
The Browns, of all teams, orchestrating the idea to expand tradable draft picks following the Watson debacle is akin to watching a gambler take out a second mortgage after exhausting his full line of credit.
Garrett or not, the Browns aren’t contending for anything significant in the NFL without a reliable quarterback. Neither Watson nor Sanders appear to be the path to get there. Trading Garrett now, in advance of a quarterback-rich 2027 draft, could provide the capital necessary to take yet another swing.
Garrett won’t turn 31 until December and Haslam believes the defender’s training and work ethic will allow him to maintain this level of play for at least another five years. He very well might be right. Some of the best edge rushers in history were productive well into their late 30s.
Will the Browns have found a quarterback before then?