Deshaun Watson: Very Telling That Browns Fans Would Boo Me For Being A Lousy Quarterback And Shitty Guy

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.

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