By Adam Minter | Updated on Oct 07, 2026 at 01:00 PM
Deshaun Watson matters again. After a few years of lousy play, injuries and irrelevance on the Cleveland Browns, he’s led the team to three straight victories and first place in their division.
With any other quarterback, that’d be a nice comeback story. With Watson, it can’t be. In March 2021, the first of more than two dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct . He denied wrongdoing, but the allegations eventually led to a lengthy NFL suspension.
The league’s disciplinary system determines when a player can return and under what conditions. It has much less control over how that return is perceived, especially when a football comeback begins to look a lot like redemption for conduct that had nothing to do with football.
As a result, the NFL has a PR predicament on its hands, one that raises fresh questions about its disciplinary policies. You could hear the tension in last Thursday’s broadcast of the Browns’ victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. At one point, Prime Video’s Al Michaels referred to Watson’s history as “ the whole Deshaun Watson thing. ” His partner, Kirk Herbstreit, observed that, with winning, “those boos turn into cheers.” To many viewers and commentators (including me), it sounded like football was trying to reclaim Watson’s story.
It’s an understandable impulse. Before the allegations surfaced, while he was still with the Houston Texans, Watson was seen as one of the league’s best young quarterbacks , the kind of player that any franchise would be thrilled to build around.
Then came the civil lawsuits, most stemming from massage appointments. The legal picture that emerged was complicated. The lawsuits were eventually settled or dismissed and two grand juries declined to indict him . However, the NFL’s disciplinary process reached a different conclusion . The league presented allegations involving four women to a disciplinary officer jointly appointed by the NFL and the players’ union. Applying the league’s definition and evidence standard, the officer found that Watson had engaged in sexual assault.
The resulting penalty, imposed by the officer, was a six-game suspension, based on league precedent. The NFL appealed, seeking an indefinite suspension of at least one year, a fine and mandatory treatment, according to ESPN . It was the right approach. Missing a few games shouldn’t be enough to put findings this serious in the past.
The eventual settlement was a compromise: 11 games, a $5 million fine and treatment. It was tougher than the original punishment, but it also gave Watson the opportunity to return before the 2022 season was over. Worse, it gave fans and commentators little basis for deciding what his reinstatement meant. Was it just time served? Had he made amends?
For the past few years, the distinction didn’t matter because Watson’s return didn’t look much like redemption. His failure to live up to the then-record $230 million fully guaranteed contract given to him in 2022 is a key reason why fans booed him as recently as August .
It doesn’t help that he has often seemed more focused on what the allegations mean for him than on the women who made them. On Thursday Night Football, for example, journalist Taylor Rooks asked Watson whether he thought fans’ skepticism toward him was fair. “Of course, to me, I’m gonna say no,” he replied. “But life isn’t fair, and I understand. I can accept my responsibilities and everything that I went through and feel and move forward.” That says plenty about what Watson felt he endured but offers little acknowledgment of why others may have trouble moving on.
Self-pity usually isn’t a good way to build a second act. Yet we can now watch something resembling character rehabilitation happen in real time via the reactions of Cleveland fans . As an NFL fan, I’m disturbed by the cheering, but I’m not surprised by it. Modern sports are built to tell comeback stories. The NFL does it constantly : an athlete goes down, battles through rehab , and his return to play is presented as hero content . Sports documentaries and pregame shows reinforce the arc, often through analysts and commentators who have come back from injuries themselves. The Associated Press even has a Comeback Player of the Year award for the league.
And that’s in large part what makes the redemption arc forming around Watson so difficult to accept. The better he plays, the easier it is for teams, commentators and fans to mistake an athletic comeback for a moral one.
To be fair, Watson is also coming back from a series of serious physical injuries. But that makes the distinction more important, not less. His football career was also interrupted by an NFL disciplinary process that found he had engaged in sexual assault.
Perhaps the NFL’s media partners will be more proactive about reminding their audiences of this fact. But whether they are or not, the league should take the opportunity to turn its attention to how it handles reinstatement in the future.
Its Personal Conduct Policy already allows banishment, indefinite suspensions, probation and conditions on reinstatement. The problem is that the disciplinary process allows too much discretion in deciding when those penalties should apply in the most serious cases. The league should set much tougher minimum standards for the worst conduct, including sexual violence, and clearer, more rigorous requirements a player must meet before returning. Those can and should be part of the next round of collective bargaining with players.
It’s in the NFL’s best interest to make sure that any player returning to the game after violating its code of ethics has really made a character change. There’s no better proof that the league’s disciplinary system is working. Is that the case for Watson? A winning streak and the roar of cheering fans can make it awfully hard to tell.
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