CLEVELAND — If Deshaun Watson wanted to assuage Browns' fans fears about his play on the field, Sunday was not a great start.
Whether it be because of suspension or serious injury, the 28-year-old quarterback has now played just 13 games since arriving in Cleveland in 2022. No. 13 was far from lucky, as Watson and the Browns' offense failed to find any rhythm in a 33-17 season-opening loss to the Dallas Cowboys.
"We've just got to play better," Watson admitted after the game.
Debuting under what had been billed as offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey's new-look scheme, Watson finished the afternoon completing 24 of 45 passes for 169 yards and a touchdown along with two interceptions. Coming off reconstructive shoulder surgery, many of his throws were either wayward downfield or within five yards of the line of scrimmage, although he said the latter was not by design.
"It's just the flow of the game," he told reporters. "Whatever the play is (that is) called, you try to find the open guy, if the guy's there, and sometimes the rush is getting there so you've got to dump it off to your check-down."
With the Browns missing both of their starting offensive tackles, "the rush" came at Watson all day from the likes of Micah Parsons and DeMarcus Lawrence and others. He was hit 17 times and sacked five times, and was also done in by a number of dropped passes from his receivers, one of which led to a pick.
"He got hit way too often," head coach Kevin Stefanski opined. "We can’t let that happen to him. He fought like crazy, and listen, the football team fought like crazy to the end. But bottom line is, we have to protect our quarterback better than that."
With the game out of reach late in the fourth quarter, Stefanski said he considered taking Watson out of the game, but the QB wanted to remain in. He ended up taking multiple blows on drop backs and runs on the last drive, which ended in a Cleveland touchdown.
"I'm going to finish the game, for sure, regardless of what the score is," Watson said of his decision to stay on the field. "I didn't work this hard to come back, even though it didn't go our way today, just to play only a little bit of it."
For his part, Watson said his shoulder felt "good" and attributed the relative lack of accuracy to "the timing of certain routes and things like that" that need to be improved upon. He also declined to cite his and other starters' lack of play during preseason games as a reason for the poor performance.
"Some people can say that contribute(d) a lot (or) my injury, guys missing time," he explained. "But at the end of the day, once you're on the field, you've got to perform. You've got to execute, and we didn't do that overall, and it showed."
Stefanski agreed.
"There’s things that I know we can do better, things that, right away, you saw that was (sic) not how we wanted to do it, but we had plenty of time to prepare," he said. "Just did not get it done today."
Watson was also dealing with multiple personal tragedies. On Friday, his father passed away; then on Saturday, Diondre Overton, his former college teammate at Clemson, was shot and killed in North Carolina.
"It’s been a long week, and they (the Browns) gave me the opportunity to go back home, but I told them I wanted to be here with my guys," Watson said. "I'm not going to use that as an excuse for why we played bad, but yeah, it was definitely a lot of, you know, a heavy heart these last couple of days."
Watson is now 8-5 in his Browns career as a starter.