Deshaun Watson playing puppet master behind the scenes has ruined the Browns

After a setback in his rehab from an Achilles tear put his football future very much in doubt, it seems like the door is wide open for the Cleveland Browns to move on from Deshaun Watson at quarterback. And not a moment too soon, as Watson has been an abject disaster for the franchise both on and off the field.

But while the Browns may finally have a new starter under center in 2025, they're going to be feeling the effects of the Watson era for quite some time. In a new expose in The Athletic, Jason Lloyd sheds new light on just how dysfunctional the last few years have been in Cleveland. And it turns out that while Watson's play was bad enough, his track record as a shadow general manager might be even worse.

Browns sabotaged their own coaching staff in ill-fated attempt to appease Deshaun Watson

Even before it was cut short by a season-ending shoulder injury, the 2023 season was hardly a promising one for Watson and the Browns offense. It was easy to write off his struggles down the stretch in 2022, having just returned from nearly two full years away from the field. 2023 should've been the year he regained the Pro Bowl form that motivated the Browns to move heaven and Earth for him in the first place — but instead, it was more of the same, with far more negative plays than explosive ones.

Rather than trying to distance themselves from a clearly failed experiment, though, the Browns doubled down. The team fired offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt, who had just built a functional offense around an aging backup in Joe Flacco, in favor of Ken Dorsey, who Cleveland believed would be a better fit for Watson's skill set. The decision proved to be a disaster: Not only did Dorsey get fired after one miserable season as play-caller, but moving on from Van Pelt also cost the Browns one of their best assets, veteran offensive line coach Bill Callahan.

Per Lloyd, Callahan had his heart set on staying in Cleveland as long as Van Pelt was still around. But once Van Pelt got canned, he jumped ship to his son Brian's staff with the Tennessee Titans. Callahan is widely regarded as one of the best offensive line coaches in NFL history, and it's no surprise that the Browns' front regressed badly in its first year without his tutelage.

Of course, Watson could've very much benefitted from a better line, as he was downright skittish in the pocket this season before suffering the Achilles tear. But this is what you get when you let the tail wag the dog, making a series of short-sighted decisions in an effort to put out the fires caused by the previous short-sighted decisions. The reality is that Cleveland handed control of the franchise to a quarterback who couldn't play, and who shifted responsibility for that fact onto everyone else around him. The team can finally move on from the former, but they'll be feeling the effects of the latter for years to come.