It’s hard to conceive of rock bottom before you hit it. But, when you get there, you know.

For the Cleveland Browns, rock bottom arrived Sunday afternoon.

As Deshaun Watson writhed on the field with a ruptured Achilles tendon, many of his own team’s fans — who had booed his pregame introduction — cheered his agony. He was carted off hiding a tearful face under a towel, and his Browns teammates shot back at the crowd, during the game and after. It’s been a miserable season in Cleveland, where a team with playoff aspirations is 1-6 and the only thing that seems consistent is disappointment by all involved.

And you know what? The Browns deserve this chaos and scorn. They asked for it.

The Ravens enter this week against their tattered division rival — the underperforming franchise quarterback lost for the year, the coach on the hot seat and the front office under financial strain based on its own bad decisions. Watson hasn’t played well enough as an NFL starter to justify his salary, but cutting bait on his contract would put the Browns in salary cap hell.

May Watson, his $230 million in guaranteed money and the broken trust of a fan base haunt them for years to come.

I think we all are wise enough now to understand that no professional sports team is composed entirely of Boy Scouts. Plenty of NFL teams overlook character concerns to sign and draft players who perform on the field.

But, even among shameless, head-in-the-sand personnel moves, Watson’s acquisition was in a league of its own. It was known that more than two dozen women had accused him of sexual assault, with stories that followed concrete patterns. He has never shown any public sense of accountability, offering unconvincingly at his introductory press conference: “I have never assaulted any woman. I have never disrespected any woman.”

At the time, Watson was facing 22 civil lawsuits from women who accused him of forcing himself upon them or pressuring them into sexual acts.

The Browns made a bet that the success Watson would bring on the field would drown out the off-field uproar. At the time, team owner Jimmy Haslam said the front office had done exhaustive research (although not talking to any of the women who accused him) on Watson: “We got very comfortable with Deshaun Watson the person.”

Imagine saying that after, say, watching HBO’s interview with alleged victim Ashley Solis, or after reading The New York Times’ exhaustive reporting on Watson’s accusers, most of whom reached settlements. Their accounts are disturbing and gutting, but they were largely ignored as Cleveland strode toward what it imagined to be a bright new era of football.

It turns out the Browns struggled to live with Watson failing to live up to his on-field billing. But what is most damning is that after swinging a trade for Watson — that cost them three first-round picks — allegedly in the name of football success, the front office then prioritized Watson over winning at every turn.

• The Browns stood by him when he served an 11-game suspension to start the 2022 season, in which the rest of the team went 4-7, essentially wasting the first year of his record-breaking contract. By the time he took the field, the Browns were out of the playoff race.
• When Watson was lost with a season-ending injury in 2023, the Browns got on a late roll with Joe Flacco running the show. Yet they fired offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt (who had coaxed four 300-plus-yard passing games without Watson) and didn’t bring Flacco back, even though he had outplayed Watson. Flacco has played well for Indianapolis this season.
• The Browns brought in Jameis Winston as a backup quarterback this season but would not bench Watson even as the team started 1-5 without eclipsing 200 passing yards in that stretch. In Week 7, after fan cheers for Winston had grown uncomfortably loud, rather than making the switch, the Browns made Winston inactive so he literally could not replace Watson. Now, with Watson injured, Winston is the starter against the Ravens. What changed in one week?

Cleveland understood it couldn’t (and won’t be able to) dig itself out of the contract it gave Watson. But instead of replacing him with a more serviceable quarterback, the Browns entrenched themselves more deeply. In the end, what was it all for? In the Watson era, they’re 19-22 with no playoff wins while being outscored by 39 points over that stretch (despite having a great defense).

It should add insult to injury that Cleveland’s giant contract to Watson may have helped the Ravens hold on to Lamar Jackson in the 2023 offseason. NFL owners were so unwilling to allow Watson’s guaranteed deal to reset the quarterback market that teams refused even to seriously consider pursuing Jackson. Baltimore benefited, signing Jackson to a deal with less guaranteed money than Watson’s while reaping the benefits of an MVP season.

The way the Browns organization has doubled down on this catastrophic decision, you could see why some fans cheered, as tasteless as that reaction was in the moment, when Watson was injured Sunday. Maybe it was the wrong way for fans to behave, but the locker room’s defense of Watson — especially Myles Garrett calling him “a model citizen” for most of his NFL tenure — rang hollow, too.

In Watson, Cleveland thought it was getting its answer at quarterback, a position the franchise has struggled to fill for going on three decades now. Instead, it has sown discord among its fans, its players and possibly itself. A lot of people — too many people — were willing to hold their noses at the stench of signing Watson, until they realized the foul odor was the football team itself rotting.

This is not justice. Justice for the women who spoke up against Watson would be getting their day in court.

But it’s only human to feel grim satisfaction at the irony of the Browns — the perpetual Charlie Browns of the NFL — making a contemptible swing for Watson and flipping head over heels again, missing the mark on all fronts. If the Ravens run roughshod over them Sunday, it would exact only an ounce of the weighty retribution this franchise deserves.

The Browns made their bed with Watson. Let them lie in it.