There are a number of very obvious reasons why Cleveland Browns fans might boo Deshaun Watson, all of which are a matter of public record and none of which Watson can really afford to concern himself with. It is a requirement of his extremely difficult job that Watson must maintain a towering and preposterous level of self-belief, a load-bearing faith that must be strong enough, which is to say unreasonable and unreasoning enough, to withstand any and every possible failure or humiliation. Being a NFL quarterback is just too difficult to do with any other mindset, and while that work is not really made easier in any meaningful way when it follows the absolute certainty that the man under center is the protagonist of reality and the hero of every story in which he might figure, Watson is not remotely alone in his rarefied professional cohort in his belief that it would be impossible to do otherwise.
This would all be more compelling if that wasn't also how basically every asshole alive sees himself and relates to the rest of the world. When the person acting like that is also a great quarterback, a large and loud cultural apparatus gets to work making it seem significant or even just complex—a half-tragic figure paying the price of greatness, the extraction of which leaves behind a gnarled and uncanny image that reveals that bargain's true cost, or something like that. There's a limit to how interesting any of that is even when the subject is a truly great athlete, primarily because the aforementioned gnarly leavings all tend to look somewhat alike once all the soft, fast-burning, human stuff is consumed.
And Deshaun Watson—who was a cipher at best even before dozens of women accused him of sexual assault, which was shortly before the Cleveland Browns paid a historic price in draft picks, money, and self-respect to acquire and retain his services—is just not a good NFL quarterback anymore. Not even good enough to sustain whatever (circular, cynical) debates about character or forgiveness or What It Takes that his presence might once have fired, and not nearly good enough to heave himself into the sort of odiously neutral media space where a player's shameful past acts get reduced to Adversities Overcome. With the Browns, Watson has been either very badly injured or roughly the worst quarterback in the NFL; in a more specific sense, he is currently bad enough to lose a quarterback competition with Shedeur Sanders, and during Saturday's preseason game in Cleveland Watson was bad enough against the third- and fourth-string defensive personnel of the Buffalo Bills to be booed by his own home crowd.
It was not the first time that Watson has been booed by Cleveland fans, and the likelihood that he would be booed by the rump faction of dead-end local perverts that turn out for Browns preseason games was high enough that Watson was asked about it going into Saturday's game. "I don't care," he said. "I don't care." It is not really important that Watson was in fact very bad in four second-half drives, or that he was booed even before he got to work being bad. None of it is important, even by the standards that apply to dispiriting backup reps in a sparsely attended preseason game. But for the record, Watson definitely cared about the booing.
Full back-and-forth with Browns QB Deshaun Watson as he was asked about getting booed in his first game back at Huntington Bank Field after he ruptured his Achilles back in 2023. "It has nothing to do about the performance. It's a little more personal than that so, that's a disrespectful thing."
— Spencer German (@spencito.bsky.social) 2026-08-22T21:51:23.998Z
"I think the whole world knows it has nothing to do about the performance," Watson said of both the booing and a performance in which he completed 5-of-12 passes for 36 yards and one interception and was arguably even worse than that line indicates. "It's a little bit [more] personal than that. So I think that's a disrespectful thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm going to keep whatever I feel with me and my family, internally, on how I feel about that. And yeah, just move on."
When asked whether the booing might have had something to do with how badly he played in that game, as well as his every previous game in a Browns uniform, Watson did not hesitate to Just Move On by placing the responsibility elsewhere. "The last time I played on this field, I tore my Achilles," he said. "And that same fanbase, they cheered when I got hurt. So what does that have to do with anything about performance? When a person gets hurt, especially for your own city, and they cheer?" There isn't really a sympathetic party to find, here, just an equilibrium that comes from everyone involved in a bad situation getting roughly what they deserve in generous and inedible portions.
"I know you asked him, like, 'Hey, how does it feel to get booed?'" Browns Head Coach Todd Monken said after the game. "It's a pretty easy question—it sucks." It may or may not be true, as Monken said, that fans would be less inclined to boo Watson if he and the team were playing well. It is quite probably beyond Watson's or Monken's capabilities to put that particular thought exercise to the test. This is just one deeply purgatorial team's preseason game, but it is also Cleveland's Deshaun Watson experience in microcosm—the sense of time being wasted, artlessly and offensively and a little violently, in the service of throwing good money after bad and the defiant denial of personal responsibility or basic accountability, both in Watson's specific case and in a broader institutional one.
"I don't regret anything in my life," Watson said after Saturday's game when asked if he regretted coming to Cleveland. "I think the lord put me through situations for a reason. I don't regret anything at all... I'm patient enough, because I'm a child of god, to wait for that time to change." This type of dull piety and self-justifying smugness is nothing new—it is the shape and substance of the mold crawling up the walls of American institutions far more significant than the Cleveland Browns—but it is grating, here as everywhere else, mostly because of how little it promises and how much it excludes. The depraved indifference is bad, but it also arrives wrapped in a vow to never, ever consider any other alternative approach. A problem talked about in this way won't ever be fixed, but it is more significant that it will also never be acknowledged.
It sucks and doesn't work, but everyone involved has accepted that they have no choice but to remain committed to it all the same. To own any of what is rotten about it is to be implicated by all of it; because there is no denying it, there can also be no admitting it. There's just more of the same, for the remaining two years of Watson's contract and then for however long it takes to fumigate.
