NFL

So I decided to put Deshaun Watson hatred aside and just look at his stats and compensation to see how bad is contract actually is. To do this, I looked at the pro football reference Approximate Value (AV) and cap number as percent of salary cap (Cap %) for every QB in 2022 who started at least as many games as DeShaun Watson, which is 4 games. In this way, we can compare how much production each team got in 2022 in return for the salary cap spending.

Top AV/Cap%

1. Jalen Hurts (2857)
2. Brock Purdy (2000)
3. Davis Mills (1167) - Hunh? Davis Mills is among the worst with only 7 AV, but he also only took up 0.6% of the cap, so he was way cheaper than he was bad = great value! If only they had used that extra cap space well!

By this metric, DeShaun Watson was the 33rd ranked QB contract year with AV/Cap% of 93, or the 6th worst of all QBs with at least 4 starts, so as of the start of this season it was already a disaster.

The only contracts worse than his by this metric, Kirk Cousins, Matt Ryan, Sam Darnold, Ryan Tannehill, and Carson Wentz, in that order. Each of these player took up at least 8.8% of the cap, and all of them except Kirk were 29th or worse in total production. Kirk was 12th, but took up 15% of the cap, which is 3rd most expensive.

But - we should note it was not because he was bad, but because of his sexual misconduct suspension that he only played 6 games. The length of this suspension was originally supposed to be only 6 games total, so he would have played 11 games. If Watson had played 11 games under the original suspension terms, and had the same amount of AV per game, he would have had the 22nd ranked QB contract year - merely on the bad side of mediocre, but not a disaster. If he had started all 17 games it would have been 20th ranked. The additional 5 games imposed after appeal therefore turned it from a kinda bad contract year to a disaster.

Now, we don't know how Watson will play for the remainder of his contract. But if he continues to play similarly at 0.67 AV per start, and we assume the QBs on average will perform similarly and be compensated similarly over the remainder of his contract as they did in 2022, we can look at where each year of his contract would rank on a per game basis, had it occurred in 2022.

• 2023: 9.4% of cap, Contract Rank: 31. Terrible.
• 2024 - 2026: 31.55%, Contract Rank: 37. Horrific.
• 2027: 4.43% of cap, Contract Rank: 31. Back to "only" terrible.

What would we have to do simply not be overpaid? Well, in that particularly horrendous 2024-2026 stretch, he would have to put out something like 123 AV just be to be ranked 19th (out of 38 QBs with at least 4 starts). Patrick Mahomes put out 17 AV in 2022, for comparison.

This contract was in fact a disaster from the start, no matter who it was, because an QB would have to be about 7x better than Patrick Mahomes for at least 3 out of 7 years just to not be overpaid. 32% of the cap for 3 years guaranteed for 3 years is truly and utterly insane.