Quarterback Slopetitions

[Types “Cleveland Browns Quarterback Competition” into web browser.]

[Steps back. Jams thumbs in ears.]

[Computer erupts in an unearthly conflagration. Image of a cackling demon appears in the smoke.]

Todd Monken told the Cleveland Browns press pool on Saturday that Shedeur Sanders would get the majority of that day's first-string practice reps. It was an unsurprising announcement, as Sanders and Deshaun Watson alternated as the "starter" through the first nine practices of training camp.

Watson, however, ended up taking all of Saturday's first-string reps. 

Welcome to the dumbest quarterback competition in human history.

“There is a lot of speculation as to what led to today’s changes,” wrote Friend-of-the-Zone Jared Mueller, perhaps understating the mood among reporters a bit.

"Whether Monken is close to naming Watson the starter, something happened in the few minutes between the media session and practice, the coach is trying to motivate Sanders, or any other suggestion that you can come up with, for one day Watson was clearly the Browns starter, and Sanders was demoted.”

Here’s my suggestion: the Browns organization hates its quarterback, its fans and itself, while holding the media in absolute contempt. The Browns decided on Watson as their starting quarterback back in March, when they restructured his contract for the umpteenth time. Monken, Jimmy Haslam and the rest of the organization think they're cleverly controlling the message, when they are essentially just drunk-texting to a group chat about how miserable they are.

The Watson-Sanders competition has been like this for months: all smokescreen, no substance. 

For example, did you hear that Watson threw seven touchdown passes in practice on Wednesday?

The touchdowns came in goalline 7-on-7’s, so we’re talking about five-yard throws in a backyard touch football game. But you can’t ignore seven touchdowns! 

Actually, you can and you should. 

Wednesday was apparently Descuzzball’s best practice day since the start of camp. “He was at least sharp in the basics on the day, which is a step forward,” wrote Chris Pokorny of Dawgs by Nature, though it doesn't sound like Pokorny attended Wednesday’s practice. (There are lots of qualifiers like “the word is” in his camp notebook.)

Watson needed a good day. He was booed by Browns fans on Tuesday. The source for this scoop is a Cleveland podcaster named Noah Olson, who was in the crowd, not the press pool. 

You may recall that ESPN’s Daniel Oyefusi and Jeremy Fowler framed booing Watson as some sort of hurtful weirdo behavior in their May scrub-and-rinse of the goldbricking sex offender’s reputation. The ESPN insiders were clearly working at the behest of the Browns organization. Credentialed reporters may therefore be wary of reporting that Watson was booed, or were warned outright not to notice it. If someone gets booed in Philly, whether at Eagles training camp or in the Home Run Derby, you are sure to hear about it. 

Everything coming out of Browns headquarters these days looks and sounds like agitprop. For example, ESPN Cleveland runs a Browns quarterback stats tracker on X. The tracker appears to be the primary source for Watson’s seven touchdowns on Wednesday. Its stats are context-free: a touchdown’s a touchdown, whether it happens in goalline 7-on-7’s against the third string, in full-squad first-team reps, or in EA Sports College Football 27 in the clubhouse after practice. Training camp stats are garbage in the best of circumstances, but ladling goalline drills into the raw data is applying a little too much polish and perfume to the turds.  

The same stat tracker listed Watson with six total interceptions earlier in camp. ESPN Cleveland then stopped listing totals, opting instead for day-to-day results. You are free to speculate as to why.

The interceptions, unlike the boos, were reported by Cleveland beat writers. In interviews, Todd Monken and others brushed them off as “rust” or Watson taking risks because it’s only practice, which is what the 49ers used to say when Jimmy Garoppolo spent whole afternoons playing catch with the cornerbacks. 

It feels like the Browns quarterback competition is taking place on X, not at a practice facility in Berea. That tracks, because the competition features the three types of individuals you meet on the former Twitter these days:

DeShaun Watson: Unrepentant misogynist pervert.

Shedeur Sanders: AI-generated wish-fulfillment avatar.

Dillon Gabriel: Plucky everyman who hasn’t figured out that he’s in the wrong place yet.

This isn’t a competition, it’s content. Trivial practice-field events are ripped from their context and tossed to the scavengers, aggregators and regurgitators. It’s a Slopetition.

Friday’s practice notes provided another sense of how things are going in Berea, as well as how things are being reported.

“Browns' secondary impresses with multiple interceptions on Day 8” reads the headline of a daily notebook by Brian D'Aguanno on the official team website. You must read a few hundred words about routine completions by Watson and Sanders, however, to discover just who tossed those picks. When D’Aguanno finally admits that the interceptions did not throw themselves, the culprits are buried deep within prepositional phrases. “In the first 11-on-11 period, S Tyron Herring and CB Michael Coats Jr. teamed up for a pass break up on a deep ball from Watson that was intended for WR Kole Wilson.”

In-house reporters for team websites must spin everything positive, of course. But most team websites try a little harder to not sound like the Daily Bugle. Spider-Man Menaces Midtown; Runaway Subway Train Saved by Unidentified Citizen. 

“Deshaun Watson had an up and down performance on Day 9 of Browns training camp, but he won the day over Shedeur Sanders by virtue of his touchdown pass in the two-minute drill at the end,” Mary Kay Cabot reported for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from Friday’s practice, providing a more balanced account of what went on.

Cabot reports that Watson’s camp interception total reached eight on Friday. “Some of them weren’t his fault, and some came when he was taking chances and testing some limits. But it’s still disconcerting for him to have been picked off that many times in the first phase of camp.” 

It sounds like Watson “won” practice on Wednesday and on Friday, by virtue of a few throws here and there. That shouldn’t be enough to call the fight, unless there was never really a fight in the first place, meaning that the Browns have just spent months going through the motions of due diligence.

Sanders, of course, is a main character on X. AI bots from Vladivostok think he’s a cross between Tom Brady and Jesse Jackson. Social media’s fiendish algorithms, with the help of some of Papa Prime’s media pals, have gaslit casual fans into thinking the notoriously insouciant nepo playground passer is both a prospect on the rise and a victim of precision-targeted oppression.

Sanders is a dangerously undiplomatic choice as a jobber in a fixed quarterback fight – that’s a Zach Wilson/Kenny Pickett sort of job – but the Browns are really, profoundly stupid. They've painted multiple bullseyes on their back. No matter what decision they make, it will be met with both fair and ridiculous criticism.

I feared to type “Shedeur Sanders” into my web browser while writing this piece; a few months ago, that was like randomly clicking ads on a porn website and entering your SSN whenever prompted. But even the folks behind clickbaity NFLBroDoofus.com-type sites have figured out that real humans don’t engage with Shedeur content unless there’s a scrap of meat on the bone.

“I’d sleep like a baby if I got to play him every week,” an anonymous defensive coordinator said of Sanders in Mike Sando’s quarterback rankings for The Athletic. That quote makes me worry about defensive coordinators. Do they like awake at night throughout autumn, trembling in fear of Bryce Young or Daniel Jones? If so, maybe they’re in the wrong profession. If I regularly lost sleep over the routine elements of my job, well, I probably wouldn't have made it to my current age.

Jared Mueller combed Sando’s piece for Browns-relevant tidbits last week, because that’s what pays the bills in our line of work. “Important to note that one voter believes so much in Monken that he put Watson in Tier 2, at least that is the assumption Sando noted.”

Watson hasn’t played a down since October of 2024, so Sando's mystery voter must really believe in Monken, or be clairvoyant, or be Watson himself. But Mueller’s note of Sando’s note of this anonymous expert’s baseless speculation has been duly noted.

Gabriel emerged as a dark horse third-party candidate in the Browns Slopetition in the middle of the week. The third guy is always the most popular guy in town during a quarterback competition, but Monken stated that Gabriel may “earn more reps” and made the wee fellow available to the media last week. That sounded at the time like pro-Gabriel/anti-Skeevy-and-Shaky messaging, but it became pretty clear on Saturday that Monken doesn’t give a damn what he tells the media/public.

ESPN’s Adam Schefter chimed in on the Watson/Sanders slow-motion trainwreck when he appeared last week on one of those talkshows where no one is allowed to wear sleeves. “I almost think that, when they open the season with two straight road games in Florida, that you might almost defer to the veteran who has been in those types of spots before,” Schefter said. “It just means that there’s a realistic chance that Deshaun Watson could wind up winning the starting job.”

Makes total sense. Watson will win the job, even if he loses it, because the Browns need a steady veteran from the late 2010s to handle the crippling pressure of 1:00 PM kickoffs in Jacksonville and Tampa.

“This was definitely framed more as an opinion than a report, but the Schefters of the NFL world don’t just conjure things up out of thin air,” noted Ryan O’Leary at Dawg Pound Daily. Or, to use Schefty’s own words: modern insiders don’t think, they almost think, just as a stenographer almost thinks when typing up a memo, or a ninth grader almost thinks when taking notes on the parts of a cell in biology class.

Someone in the Browns organization told Schefter that Watson would be the starter, then gave him a plausible justification to disseminate, just in case Watson keeps throwing practice-field interceptions from the backs of prepositional phrases. Someone – maybe the same someone, maybe not – then decided to unofficially end the charade on Saturday. The press-conference fib may have been indecision or a grimy power move by a coach who knows he’s only holding a pair of deuces. It may also have been one last ham-handed act of message control: the Browns preventing reporters from blasting the change in quarterback plans for a few precious hours, then shielding Monken from having to explain his decision until Monday. 

If it sounds like I have gone full Howard Beale on the Browns quarterback competition, you should hear how mad-as-hell Cleveland radio personality Nick Wilson sounds:

The 'Kool-Aid drinking' on Deshaun Watson in this town is absolutely insane. It's not the fans, guys. I've got to call my media brethren out on this. It is insane.

God, let's just say the truth here: Shedeur has looked like the better quarterback. Whether he looked great or not, he has looked like the better quarterback in 80% of the practices that we've all been able to see. … We don't all have to just say whatever the Browns want us to say. But that's what's happening. We have free will. We've got the ability to say what we actually think instead of what somebody over there wants us to say and think. – Nick Wilson, per Papiya Chatterjee for Yahoo! Sports. 

I know several of the people quoted in this segment, but I have never met Wilson. I have no reason to trust his Sanders takes. But there’s no denying that coverage of the Browns quarterback competition has been smothered with tiptoeing, pandering, gladhanding, spin-doctoring and party-line parroting. The worst organization in American sports is hosting a sham competition between a has-been who should be forced to wear an ankle bracelet and a lad I wouldn’t trust to hand out Michelob Ultras at a beach bar. We don’t have to like it, or pretend that it’s normal. And we certainly shouldn’t feel compelled to feast on what the Browns are feeding us. 

My gut tells me that Watson will suffer some “flare up” and return to the Forever Averse to Performing list well before the Browns host the Steelers in Week 4. The injury will likely coincide with some miserable on-field performance, whether in the preseason or in Florida. 

Watson isn’t really an NFL quarterback anymore. If he were, he’d have flicked Sanders and Gabriel aside in minicamp. He’s now just a social media ghost who peaked in 2020, got cancelled in 2021 and vanished in 2024. Everything about him is secretive, speculative, contrived or fake. It’s as if Watson himself was purchased by venture capitalists and strip-mined of anything useful years ago, leaving a hollowed-out, enshittified shell to shamble on in his place. Watson’s a former magazine that’s now just banner ads and autotext, a burger joint that replaced its real bacon with salty soy powder. He’s not even much of a punching bag for righteous anger anymore; there’s always some politician who is both more disgusting and relevant. 

So … how did Watson look after being handed a silver-platter opportunity on Saturday? “Watson delivered a pretty solid day of practice," Chris Pokorny wrote, “making that twice in three practice days that he’s looked like a respectable NFL quarterback again.”

That would be twice in ten days, folks. But if the Browns aren’t counting, why should we?

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