The Opening Drive 7/30: Deshaun Watson Struggling is What We've Come to Expect
Training Camp Day 1 review which featured more inconsistency from Watson.
Training camp opened Wednesday at CrossCountry Mortgage Campus, and Todd Monken got the moment he’s been building toward since his introductory press conference back in January — his first real practice as an NFL head coach, in front of a quarterback competition he still refuses to hand to anyone. Before the pads came out, he made clear nothing had shifted since the spring: all four quarterbacks would work, but Deshaun Watson and Shedeur Sanders would keep splitting the ones on parallel fields, with Watson drawing the bulk of the starting-unit reps for Day 1 and Sanders getting more the following day. Monken’s guiding rule for how those reps get carved up hasn’t changed either — starters near half the workload, the twos a third, the threes filling in the rest, “according to the depth chart,” as he put it, while acknowledging that ratio rarely survives contact with an actual practice schedule.
What followed was more of what we’ve come to expect with Watson. Working almost exclusively with the starting offense, he struggled to find any consistency and threw interceptions on back-to-back attempts during 11-on-11 work. The first was on a bootleg where he had Tylan Wallace on a crossing route that he left behind Wallace without pace and was easily intercepted by Denzel Ward.
The second interception to Damarri Mathis was on a play-action concept where Watson stares down his deep dig and throws it without seeing Mathis at all.
Todd Monken spoke on both interceptions with Cleveland Browns Daily following the session. “It was a great play more by (Ward) than to me a poor decision. I was standing right behind Deshaun, I would have made the throw … the second one was a dig where he was late.”
Watson also nearly gave up a third, with linebacker Carson Schwesinger getting a hand up on an underneath route before the ball fell incomplete. Watson had a run of misses, picks and floaters that defined the day overall — which tracks with a passer who never found a rhythm across either team period or really since 2020.
Sanders, working the parallel field against the second-team defense with plenty of reps with rookies KC Concepcion and Denzel Boston, didn’t light the world on fire but also didn’t turn the ball over. At this point a clean day of ball security matters, even if it’s against a lesser look. The box score is the least interesting part of this despite Cleveland having a local outlet determined to release this everyday.
The offense struggling in Day 1 is no surprise, but the interceptions, miscalculations, and poor performances from either quarterback in this battle is noteworthy.
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