Shedeur Sanders first-team reps went to zero on Saturday, on the exact day Todd Monken stood in front of reporters and said Sanders was getting them. And it’s worse than a coach changing his mind, because there’s already a plan. NFL Network’s Cameron Wolfe reported Cleveland intends to give Watson and Sanders one preseason start apiece before naming a Week 1 starter. Monken immediately pushed back and called that tentative. Tentative! They’ve got a preseason opener at Chicago on August 15 and a staff that won’t commit to a schedule it already leaked.
Monken told the media Sanders had the ones. Then he walked outside and Deshaun Watson took every rep with the ones. Daniel Oyefusi at ESPN had Sanders splitting whatever was left with Dillon Gabriel. Daryl Ruiter said out loud that Monken pulled a fast one on the room, which is a beat guy telling you his head coach lied to him about a practice.
Shedeur Sanders First-Team Reps Are A Chore Chart Nobody Follows
Understand how this camp has actually been run. Watson and Sanders alternate days with the starters. It’s a rotation. There’s a schedule for who takes snaps with the good players, which is already a strange way to find out who your quarterback is, and Saturday was a Sanders day. Then it wasn’t.
Watson went 23 of 34 with four touchdowns and no picks in that session. Sanders went 16 of 20 with no turnovers running the twos. Both of those lines are fine. Neither of them means anything, because none of it happened against a defense allowed to hit the quarterback.
There Is No Money Argument Here, Cleveland Already Cut The Check
This is the one everybody gets wrong, and it’s the whole reason Saturday stinks.
Watson is in the final year of the fully guaranteed five year, $230 million contract. He was set to carry an $80.7 million cap hit in 2026, which would have been the largest single-season number in league history. In March the Browns restructured it again, converting $44.745 million of his $46 million salary into a bonus and freeing roughly $36 million in space. Cutting him after June 1 saves nothing. Whatever they do with him in 2027 already comes with about $86 million in dead money attached.
So run it out. Playing Watson saves the Browns zero dollars. Benching Watson costs the Browns zero dollars. The contract is a corpse either way. There’s no accountant in Berea whispering that the $46 million guy has to take the snaps, because the $46 million guy already has the $46 million.
So Saturday had nothing to do with the contract. They just want Watson. Wanting a guy is something you’re allowed to say out loud.
The Browns Passed On This Kid Six Times, Then Andrew Berry Went And Got Him
The other half of this is 2025, and it has never really gone away.
Cleveland passed on Shedeur Sanders six separate times in that draft. They took Dillon Gabriel at 94 in the third round while Sanders was sitting there. Then on day three they sent picks 166 and 192 to Seattle to move up to 144 and end the slide. Jimmy Haslam said in July that if you had told him Friday night they were going to pick Shedeur, he would have said that’s not happening, and then he put the whole thing on Berry. Andrew made the call to pick Shedeur.
Berry is still there. Kevin Stefanski isn’t, fired in January after a 5-12 season. So the one guy in the building who actually wanted Sanders is the one who survived, and the coach evaluating him now has no history with him at all.
The Browns Quarterback Competition Is Real Until The Second It Matters
Now the honest half, and Shedeur people aren’t going to love it. He wasn’t good last year. Seven starts, 3-4, 57 percent, 7 touchdowns against 10 interceptions, a 68.1 rating, and the most picks in the entire NFL from his Week 11 debut on. A coach looking at that tape and preferring a healthy 30 year old is not committing a crime.
But Watson hasn’t taken a live snap since October 20, 2024. He tore the Achilles, had surgery, tore it again during rehab, missed all of 2025, and has played 19 games in four seasons in Cleveland with a 9-10 record. That’s the other side of this audition.
Pick one. Genuinely, pick either one. This is a 5-12 roster that traded away a two-time Defensive Player of the Year and might start five new offensive linemen, so the ceiling on this season is a rounding error regardless.
What’s not fine is announcing a fair fight, printing a schedule, ignoring the schedule, and then letting everybody spend another week arguing about a decision that already got made in a room nobody was invited to. Todd, you are allowed to want Deshaun Watson. Nobody’s going to storm Berea over it. Just stop making everyone sit through an audition you already scored.
