Todd Monken’s first season in Cleveland has already been swallowed by the quarterback question, and a simple rep shuffle on Saturday turned it into a bigger mess.
What started as a last-minute change in the Browns’ quarterback rotation quickly spilled into a full-blown distraction at camp, with fans - and possibly some players - lining up behind Shedeur Sanders and against the move to keep Deshaun Watson with the first team.
Monken defended the decision Monday, telling reporters, “I sure as hell wasn’t thinking on coming back down to tell you guys that I was gonna change my mind. I really don’t have to, so that’s just the way, being the head coach, I can kinda do that.”
He also explained the logic behind the switch, saying he had been told “Shedeur has been getting a few more reps with the ones,” which led him to decide “Yeah, sure, we’ll flip it and next week we’ll go the other way.”
That sounds harmless enough on the surface - a way to even things out between Watson and Sanders. But it lands differently when you remember Monken said back in March that the reps wouldn’t be split evenly.
Until now, the Browns had appeared to be following a plan that alternated between the two quarterbacks. So the timing of the Saturday change raised plenty of questions.
On Saturday, Sanders worked walkthroughs with the first team, only to be bumped once practice started, with Watson taking every starter rep. Monken later said Sanders would work with the starters on Monday - “unless on the way out I change my mind,” he joked - but the sudden flip had already done its damage.
Monken still called it a competition, saying, “As long as we’re still sharing reps, it’s a competition”, but the way those reps are divided matters just as much as the fact that they’re being shared.
The Browns’ quarterback situation is complicated by more than just camp rotations. Whether the call came from Monken alone, or whether Andrew Berry and/or Jimmy Haslam had a hand in it, isn’t clear. What is clear is that Cleveland’s decision to bring Watson back into the mix was one of the more striking developments of the offseason.
In a vacuum, opening the job to the best passer available makes sense for a team that has been searching for a franchise quarterback for a long time. But Cleveland isn’t operating in a vacuum, and the results so far haven’t done Watson any favors.
By all accounts from people who have seen the competition, Watson still hasn’t shown enough to separate himself. That’s a rough look for a 30-year-old veteran who’s supposed to be in his prime, cost the Browns three first-round picks, a third-rounder and two fourths, and arrived on the other side of a still NFL-record $230 million fully guaranteed five-year deal.
And that makes the current setup even harder to ignore: Watson is not clearly outperforming a second-year fifth-rounder who is in his first training camp getting first-team reps.
Given the way Cleveland has handled Sanders for the last year and a half, it’s hard not to think Watson would already have been named QB1 if he had shown anything that suggested he could actually win the job. Monken, after all, wanted the competition settled by minicamp.
That’s the part that makes this whole thing feel less like a true battle and more like a Browns construction project gone sideways. If Cleveland had paired Sanders with a rookie drafted in the high-to-mid rounds, maybe this would look like a cleaner fight. Or maybe the Browns should have trusted Sanders from the start, the way many of his teammates seem to, and used Watson as more of a mentor during the final year of his deal.
Instead, the competition doesn’t feel especially genuine.
Fans aren’t supposed to pick an NFL starter, but when they’re booing the quarterback you’ve put forward at training camp, that’s not exactly a great sign - especially for a team trying to sell PSLs for a new stadium that’s set to open in a few years.
And for Monken, this is not the kind of opening act he wanted. His first run as an NFL head coach is already under the microscope at the sport’s most important position, which happens to be the area where he’s supposed to know the most. Right now, his handling of the quarterback battle has done one thing very effectively: it’s given everybody in Cleveland a reason to question him.
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