Browns Diary, Week 8: Turning the Page

Cleveland 29, Baltimore 24

This section will be the very last one I write this season about Deshaun Watson. It might be the last I ever write about him, period—here’s hoping—but it will definitely be the last I write this season. We are moving on to a few memories of the wonderful Jim Donovan, and then going forward we’ll be focusing on the Browns’ efforts to put an interesting season together.

But before I put Watson into the JoeBlogs dustbin, yeah, I do feel like I should wrap things up with just one more thought.

Here goes.

It was all his fault. All of it.

Oh, sure, he did have accomplices. Some blame has to be assigned to the geniuses in the front office who gave up everything to get Watson when he faced two dozen sexual misconduct lawsuits and a lengthy NFL suspension and had not played football in a year. Some blame has to be given to the Haslams as owners because they’ve run the team into the ground, and they’re trying to run them out of downtown Cleveland, and they were surely a driving force behind the sad desperation that led to getting Watson. I’m torn on how much blame should be allocated to Our Guy Kevin Stefanski because I want to believe he’s known all along that Watson was destroying his team.

If that’s so, though, why did he keep playing Watson?

My guess is that it’s: