The Deshaun Watson Ruling Is An Indictment of Everyone Except Deshaun Watson

New personal conduct policy and player discipline process; same ol’ disquieting results.

On August 18, the NFL doled out its final ruling on Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson, increasing his suspension from six to 11 games and forcing him to pay an additional $5 million in fines.

The monetary punishment is an NFL record and the extended enforced absence is nearly double what the independent arbitrator initially recommended. Still, the resolution comes after nearly two years of legal and labor back-and-forths, a seemingly endless parade bad headlines and worse revelations, and — and this cannot be underscored enough — Watson set himself up in a new city with a guaranteed $230 million windfall even if he never plays another snap.

When pressed by reporters for a reaction, Watson said he was “grateful.” He should be. It could’ve gone plenty worse for a man who has already settled twenty separate civil cases of sexual misconduct. He then added, “I take accountability for the decisions I made.” If you’ve been following the news since it first broke, you know that’s a masterclass in handwaving.

Throughout the proceedings, Deshaun Watson has taken precisely zero accountability. His dearth of regard or remorse remains among the coldest image rehabilitation strategies on record. Yet, if we’re looking to ask for more out of anyone, we need to once again return to a familiar object of scorn: The NFL and the men who populate the league office, team offices, and locker rooms.

This Time Was Supposed to be Different

The NFL came into this new case trying to outrun its own checkered history of dealing with gendered violence among its ranks. A new collectively bargained personal conduct policy and player discipline process hoped to standardize and streamline things while setting precedents that aimed for consistency.

Drawn-out processes and arbitrary rulings were part and parcel of the old system — try drawing a throughline between Ben Roethlisberger, Ray Rice, Ezekiel Elliott, Antonio Brown, and Jameis Winston, to pick five names at random — and this go-around hoped to drive order, efficiency, and justice. It delivered none of the above.

Under the old system, there were some mitigating factors unrelated to the severity of the crime that served as better predictors of punishment.

In general, players faced harsher headwinds than coaches, and the higher up the team or league’s corporate hierarchy you went, the softer the book was thrown.

The player’s race, position, skill level, and youth also factored into decisions … or at the very least appeared to, which is still very bad, especially for an optics-centric entity like the NFL. Bad players were unceremoniously cut, middling players sat out a while then changed teams, and superstars got the white-glove kid-glove treatment.

Most flummoxing, gendered misconduct seemed to carry lighter sentences than just about every other flavor of violation. Emerging star receiver Calvin Ridley’s sitting out all of 2022 for gambling on the NFL while already on sabbatical to take care of his mental health. Former star receiver Josh Gordon sat out multiple years for multiple substance-related infractions, even as states increasingly decriminalize cannabis. Former star quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem and never worked again.

Those three examples are all wildly different — what Kaepernick did violated no written law and was frankly a necessary and mildly effective form of protest — yet none rise to the level of what Deshaun Watson did. Still, come December, Watson will play football. (Gordon will, too, after missing 83 games over the past seven years.)

Muddying the water further is the closest thing we have to “precedent”: In 2015, old court documents featuring similar allegations against future hall-of-fame quarterback Peyton Manning were unearthed. The NFL, the University of Tennessee, and the courts all conspired to keep those unflattering (and possibly illicit) details under wraps.

By the time they became public knowledge, Peyton was weeks away from winning his second Super Bowl in his final game, and riding off into the sunset. As a future hall-of-fame quarterback who made the league oodles of money and was also white, the NFL pursued the matter no further and it quickly faded from public consciousness.

All these damning bricks forced the league and players union’s hands into reaching some kind of accord at a system overhaul. They reached it, and Deshaun Watson’s case was the first bite at the apple of justice. We all leave with a bitter, yet familiar, aftertaste.

An Army of Enablers

Watson’s behavior has been protected and encouraged by just about everyone associated with him or with the league. Throughout the league, the echoes of silence from other players, coaches, media, and team executives strongly suggest a culture of complicity. Soundbites admonishing Watson for his conduct are vanishingly rare and haven’t grown louder or more numerous as his cases have progressed.

The Houston Texans, Houston Police Department, and Watson’s lawyer aided and abetted Watson’s behavior through varying degrees of coverup, negligence, hesitance, or active enablement.

After the Texans shelved Watson — while still allowing him to collect a paycheck for an entire year — for 2021, at least seven other NFL teams inquired about trading for him. Those teams are the Miami Dolphins, Carolina Panthers, Seattle Seahawks, Minnesota Vikings, Cleveland Browns, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the New Orleans Saints. They were willing to stomach having someone the courts determined to be “predatory” on their roster after doing their own “due diligence.”

Ultimately, the Cleveland Browns were willing to sacrifice the most integrity and trade assets to bring Watson into the organization, dealing first-round draft picks in 2022, 2023, and 2024, as well as a third-round pick in 2023 and fourth-round picks in 2022 and 2024.

Owner Jimmy Haslam, apparently impervious to the concept of self-owning, justified the decision: “I think it’s important to remember that Deshaun is 26 years old, OK, and is a valuable N.F.L. quarterback, and we’re planning on him being our quarterback for a long time.”

His actions align. The Browns then signed Watson to a five-year, $230 million contract — at that point the most guaranteed money in NFL history.

Have We Learned Nothing?

Deshaun Watson is just 26, and he should be allowed the capacity to change and be given the grace and space to do so to the extent that he is capable. I hope he does. The two dozen accusers leave me feeling skeptical and maybe even cynical that he will.

As a rule, most young people deserve a redemption arc if they’re willing to work and make real amends. Yet they do not need to be given $50M+ every year to do so. They do not need to be broadcast nationally on televisions into living rooms with millions of kids, women, and survivors of sexual violence watching.

Perhaps the best example of a changed man from the recent NFL past remains Michael Vick who, after helping finance and facilitate a multimillion-dollar dogfighting ring, served 21 months in federal prison before returning to the league and conducting himself about as well as any former federal prisoner convicted of organized animal cruelty ever could. He said the right things, atoned through his actions, worked his way back onto the field and stayed on the right side of the law and the league’s good graces. He now coaches and occasionally appears as a television analyst.

Yet Vick is an absolute best-case scenario and I know there’s still a large segment of fans who will never forgive him, nor should they be forced to. That’s their prerogative.

But the long time away is important. If someone cannot feel the pain of losing it all — the money, the fans, the career, the accolades, the freedom to move and act unimpeded knowing full well who they were and what they did — they will fail to feel the incentive to transform themselves into someone better than the type of person who repeatedly uses his power and notoriety to take advantage of women sexually.

The consequences Watson will face, relative to his stature in the NFL and as a public figure, are a slap in the face to people who love the NFL. In rejiggering its disciplinary machinery, the NFL somehow changed everything and nothing. Everyone comes out of the wash dirtier than before — the Texans, the Browns, the teams that tried and failed, Roger Goodell, the Players Association, the NFL, the justice system, and the fans willing to look past this. (If you want to lose your faith in humanity, watch, or listen to, video of Browns fans rallying around Watson in practice. It’s out there; I’m not linking to it.)

Three months off and what amounts to all but $225M of his future pretax income, juxtaposed against a mountain of evidence that the independent arbitrator — in her initial ruling that sided with the NFL even as she recommended just six games — deemed “egregious” and “predatory” doesn’t sit right and sets an even worse precedent that boxes the league into a corner: either toughen up and run the risk of being labeled inconsistent or indiscriminate (or worse), or keep things lax for every fresh violation of a woman’s physical autonomy.

The NFL is fighting a war on multiple fronts in its mission to “protect the Shield.” It isn’t fighting that war fairly, justly, equitably, or consistently. But to say that belabors the obvious and obscures the larger point: It shouldn’t be fighting to “protect the Shield” at all. It’s a war everyone loses.

Deshaun Watson will probably play football this year, next year, and the year after, maybe even carving out a nice career for himself. He’ll make a lot of money doing it.

Meanwhile, the NFL will once again look into making marginal adjustments that change nothing and repeatedly fail to rid the league of its most unsavory characters, no matter how much better they get at distancing themselves from them.

The NFL will again err on the side of moving on from controversy vs moving past it, on the side of working around its darkness vs working through it, on the side of making it go away over making it better.

I hope Deshaun Watson sees this ruling as the gift that it is and makes transformational change for himself and amends to the women he harmed and women everywhere who feel slighted and shortchanged by this slow-pitch softball of accountability.

I hold out less hope for the league. Someone, somewhere will hurt someone again. The NFL will do harm in addressing the harm, and the rest of us will keep watching, wondering why it never feels any better, never feels any different, and never seems to end.

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