Amid a frustrating season, the Browns sold at the trade deadline, following up an earlier trade involving Amari Cooper by shipping Za'Darius Smith to Detroit before Tuesday's 4 p.m. ET buzzer sounded.
With the deadline behind them, the time arrived for general manager Andrew Berry to meet with the media. Those looking for revelatory information will be disappointed by the results.
Predictably, Berry admitted the 2-7 Browns haven't lived up to expectations. But when it came time to answer questions about how the Browns might proceed from here -- starting with the albatross that is Deshaun Watson, who currently is recovering from a ruptured Achilles and has two years remaining on a five years, $230 million, fully guaranteed -- Berry remained intentionally vague.
"Really our focus with Deshaun -- I would say, for any player with a season-ending injury and a major injury -- is first and foremost with the recovery and to make sure he gets healthy from the Achilles injury," Berry said when asked what Cleveland's plans for Watson might entail in 2025. "Everything else we'll deal with at a later moment."
The "later moment" is the most crucial point in the Browns' outlook, both for 2025 and years to come. Cleveland's big swing at a star quarterback ended up being a massive whiff and could go down as one of the worst trade in NFL history. So too was the historic contract the Browns handed Watson in order to complete the deal.
"I'm really not in reflection mode," Berry said when asked if it was wise to acquire Watson in such a fashion in 2022. "I think that's probably. ... I remember I got asked this about last year. It's really more not really my focus at this point in the year. Our focus is really on finishing out the 2024 season, having the team play at a higher level and then we'll get to those maybe longer-term or big-picture reflections at a later point in time."
Watson showed the slightest glimpses of potentially being a quarterback worth that money over the last two seasons, but never came anywhere close to sustaining the type of performance that justifies a fully guaranteed contract of such magnitude. The most prevalent result was a massively disappointing one, and had Watson not injured his Achilles in Week 7, it was at least somewhat likely he was going to be benched at some point anyway.
Simply, Watson no longer performed like a player deserving of one of 32 starting jobs in the NFL. But Berry on Wednesday did not assign all of the blame to Watson.
"I would say more broadly we didn't play well, we haven't played well as a team and we haven't played well as a unit on offense," Berry said. "I think oftentimes when you don't play well on offense, obviously your starting quarterback and your play-caller will get the most criticism. But the reality of it is, offenses, it comes down to organization and synchronization. There's just a lot of shared ownership across the different position groups in terms of why we didn't perform."
Berry isn't entirely wrong here. Cleveland's offense -- which they'd attempted to improve by hiring former Bills offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey in the offseason -- has been a tire fire, breaking 20 points just once this season in a shocking upset win over Baltimore in Week 8 in Jameis Winston's first start of the season.
Watson certainly did them no favors when he was on the field, either, and when Winston replaced him in the lineup and threw three touchdowns in the win, it was pretty clear Watson was a massive problem, if not the problem.
Because Berry restructured Watson's contract twice over the last two years, Cleveland is still on the hook for a massive sum. Watson carries a cap number of $72.9 million in each of the next two seasons, and if the Browns were to cut Watson in the next year, they'd carry dead cap sums ranging between $118.9 million and $172.7 million in 2025, according to Over The Cap.
The salary cap for the 2024 season was set at $255.4 million. It doesn't take a mathematics expert to identify how crushing such a move would be to the Browns' hopes of fielding a competitive roster in 2025.
There is a path to divorce that would be tolerable financially: The Browns could trade Watson in a post-June 1 move this summer and clear $46 million in cap. Such a deal could look much like the one the Browns accepted from Houston in 2017, in which they took on quarterback Brock Osweiler's bloated contract in exchange for the Texans' second-round pick in the 2018 draft -- which eventually became star running back Nick Chubb-- and a 2017 sixth-round selection.
There's no guarantee such a deal is possible now, though, unless the Browns are willing to part with a similarly high-value pick, adding to the cost of the regrettable decision they made to acquire Watson.
Even if Berry isn't interested in reflecting right now, scores of others have already done so, and the post-mortem isn't pretty. We'll never know who made the final call on the Watson deal, but right now, Berry and ownership both share responsibility.
"I'd say this, like we've always said, all of us were on board," Berry said. "Everyone's on board, and obviously with a big commitment in that regard, that's always going to be the case."
When it comes to charting a course forward, it's difficult to predict how things might unfold for this organization.
Berry and coach Kevin Stefanski have brought the most stability to the franchise since they returned as an expansion outfit in 1999. Stefanski has won Coach of the Year twice, owns a 1-2 record in three playoff appearances and has managed to keep the team on a relatively steady track even amid frequent change under center.
Despite his accomplishments, the remaining eight games feel momentous. If the Browns continue to trudge toward a dark offseason at their current rate, anything seems possible in regards to potential changes to the coaching staff and front office.
With their playoff hopes all but gone, the Browns still have jobs to play for in 2024.
"It's obviously a disappointment. We haven't played well enough," Berry said. "We haven't done the things that are needed to achieve consistent results and consistent wins throughout the season. It's disappointing for us internally, disappointing for our fans, and really all of us share in the record. It's not just our players and coaches. It's myself, it's our personnel staff, it's our research group. Our focus really this week is on doing the things that are within our control to play quality football through the last eight weeks of the regular season because we have not done that to date."
It sure seems, though, as if Watson has potentially played his last game in a Browns uniform -- even if Berry left the door open to a return, telling reporters "there’s always a possibility of that.”
In the end, the Browns have found themselves in a painfully familiar situation with a team that proved it was good enough to make the playoffs in 2023, but one that lacks a franchise quarterback. It will be up to Berry to devise a plan to fix that in 2025 -- that is, if he's around long enough to execute it.