Deshaun Watson is Bad at Everything Now
No really, I mean everything.
Deshaun Watson is a terrible person and in any just society he would be anywhere else in the world besides making millions of dollars to play a children’s game in front of America every week. Unfortunately, there was a 3-year period of his life where he was one of the best QBs in the NFL so he gets to be unfathomably rich and famous in spite of 22 women suing him for sexual harassment and another accusing him of sexual assault. We can at least take solace in the fact that ever since he’s returned to the field in 2022, he’s become much worse at literally everything he’s done on the gridiron.
When I say that Deshaun Watson is worse at everything I don’t mean as a person. Clearly, that’s impossible. But he has significantly regressed as a quarterback in every meaningful way that we can measure.
Despite leading the Texans to a 4-12 season in 2020, Watson posted the best statistical season of his career. He led the NFL in passing yards and yards per attempt, was being touted as one of the best young QBs in the NFL along side Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, and was on track to earn one of the biggest contracts in NFL history. Since that point he has played 13 games and been absolutely horrendous in all of them. In every major category he has regressed an outrageous degree to where he is now one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL. It has gotten to the point of national media openly calling for journeyman Jameis Winston to start.
It’s difficult to overstate how stark this drop off is. The drop off is so vast that it makes the conclusion “Deshaun Watson sucks as a QB now too” self-evident, and doesn’t require any further analysis or complex analytical tricks to tease out an exact estimate of how much worse. His EPA/Attempt drop of -0.39 and CPOE drop of -8.0% are the same distances between Josh Allen (0.19, 5.0%) and Tommy DeVito (-0.19, -2.9%) in 2023. Last season’s version of Zach Wilson had a higher completion percentage (60.1%) than Watson has had with the Browns. He’s just awful now. That’s great!
What if this is just a fluke though? He’s only played in 13 games, so maybe he’s just done worse in one sort of situation and he could regress back to being great again. Let’s check.
No worries here! He is actually just uniformly worse everywhere as a passer. There is no positive news here. Even the glimpses of life - slightly higher YPA and EPA/Attempt on deep passes, one (1) fewer interceptions on medium passes - are either so miniscule they’re not worth mentioning or are the results of extremely small sample sizes on a volatile type of play.
There is no room for optimism here. He is on the whole efficient at medium depths, but he’s throwing to that region about 4% less often than he was in Houston (27.1% vs 23.2%). Also even though those throws are still efficient, they’re comparatively less efficient than in 2020 and everything else is so horrendously stinky it just doesn’t matter. So not only is he worse overall, he’s worse across the board without any reason to think he could get better. This is all very exciting news!
Well before we get too carried away, we have to remember that he was an accomplished runner while in Houston. So let’s check if that is still the case.
As much as it pains me to admit, this is some evidence to suggest that when he scrambles he is roughly as explosive as he was previously. He is less consistent (16.3% drop in success rate) but he gains roughly as many yards as he did previously. But again it doesn’t actually matter on the whole.
At this point you could probably say the best outcome every time he drops back is if he scrambles. So naturally, he has done that at a lower rate than his best ever season! Not only has he done that at a lower rate, his already high sack rate has rocketed up to astronomical heights. Any potential positives from his scrambles are diminished by the fact he’s doing it less, and cancelled out by the fact he’s getting sacked more often and thus killing more drives. We’re at the point where even the “good” with Watson is bad.
This is great news for humanity and those of us who like when bad things happen to bad people and the bad organizations which enable them. I’m happy that he’s awful at football now and has left the Browns in a rudderless position. I don’t really care about why exactly he’s bad now, but if I were to hazard a guess I would imagine injuries play a significant role. He had a rotator cuff injury for a majority of last season as well as the rust of not playing for 2 years and adjusting to a new offensive system.
He also has to deal with the demons whom I hope are haunting his every breathing moment after traumatizing at least 23 women. I would imagine that could probably impact your ability to play football well. I hope they stay there for the rest of his career.
Not the purpose of the article, but I think it's pretty clear that Jameis Winston is a better QB than Deshaun Watson. Jameis has never had a negative CPOE in an NFL season. Deshaun has done it over the last 2+. If I were a Browns fan I would be clamouring for Jameis too if the team was trying to win. Since they're starting Deshaun, it's pretty clear this is a tank season, and boy that must be fun for the Cleveland faithful to be tanking and looking out onto the field at that guy.
We all know what happened to Deshaun the human, but what on Earth happened to Deshaun the football player? Like you said, he got uniformly worse at everything, seemingly without anything physical happening to cause it. I don't feel especially bad for him or for the Browns, but I do feel bad for the Cleveland fans who have to live through all this.