First Take

Good morning. We had an hour on Dallas built and it is gone, and none of you look like you slept.

Holla at your boys! Good morning and welcome to First Take. And Shae, I’m going to go slow this morning, because I have watched that press conference four times and I want to be careful with every single word I put on this table. To be fair to Deshaun Watson — and I am going to be fair to him, because I was fair to him in 2022 when being fair to him cost me something — that man has denied this from the first day. Adamantly. Under oath. In front of cameras. To a league that spent a year investigating him. No prosecutor in Texas ever charged him with a crime. That is the record. I am not a judge. I’m a television commentator, and I know the difference between those two jobs even on a morning when the internet has decided there isn’t one.

However. However! I am disgusted this morning, and I’m going to be precise about who I am disgusted with, because it is not the quarterback and it has never been the quarterback. It is the people who were running that organization in 2022. You sent three first-round draft picks to Houston, Texas. You sent them knowing everything the rest of us knew, because all of it was public and every single one of us could sit down and read it. And then you went one step further, and you gave that man every dollar of that contract fully guaranteed, which no other franchise in this sport was willing to do, and you built it that way so that a suspension could never take a cent out of his pocket. That was the design. That was the entire point of the structure. And then when it came apart on you, you stood up at a podium and you apologized to the city of Cleveland like something had been done to you. Somebody made that choice. A person made it, and that person had a name and a title.

I’ve been doing this thirty years and I have never watched a football team spend that kind of money and then describe it in public as something that happened to them.

And the man who let him go is on day two of the job and used a word nobody in that chair says out loud.

By the way, quick aside, quick aside — everybody is walking around this morning saying that young man spent a hundred and seventeen million dollars. He did not spend it. It was spent in 2022. It was spent the afternoon somebody signed a fully guaranteed contract that thirty-one other teams looked at and would not go near. All that happened yesterday afternoon is the bill came out of the drawer.

And that family held that position in public in 2022, when it cost them nothing and got them nothing, and I will give them that much this morning.

There are three things that happened in Cleveland inside forty-eight hours, and people are arguing about all three of them as though they were one thing. They hired somebody with no professional history in the sport. He released a quarterback. He said why, in language nobody in that job uses in public. You can hold almost any combination of positions on those three and still be a coherent person, and I have not seen one person pull them apart since yesterday.

Football part’s short. Sanders. Gabriel. That’s the depth chart. Third guy hasn’t been signed, free agency is five weeks out.

Dan just made this table very quiet and I don’t think he was trying to. Mina, you have been writing on that pad.

I’m not making a point. Somebody asked what the roster is. That’s the roster. Two guys, both going into year two.

I want to put the strongest objection to yesterday on this table, because I don’t think the people making it are making it well and it deserves better than it’s getting. It isn’t that Deshaun Watson is innocent. It’s that a private employer with a payroll and a live microphone settled a question our courts declined to settle, in front of a country that was always going to applaud, and there is no mechanism anywhere that checks a decision like that. That is a serious argument. It does not require you to like him and it does not make the people making it cranks.

There it is.

I disagree, and then I’m going to tell you the part where I don’t have an answer, and I want everybody to stay with me for both halves. Every employer in this country decides who works for them. Every single one of them. Cleveland decided in 2022. Nobody called that one a verdict. Nobody sat on this network and said a football team had no business rendering judgment on a man, because that judgment went the other way and it came with a quarterback attached to it. And then here is where I stop, Mina. When a man in that chair puts that word on somebody that no court has convicted, something has moved that I don’t believe any of us have thought all the way through. I called four people last night that I have known twenty-five years and no two of them told me the same thing. I have not gotten those two ideas to agree with each other since three o’clock yesterday and I am not going to sit up here and pretend that I have.

We have two hours and we are not settling that. Skip is in for the next one.

Two days into the job, no coaching résumé of any kind, and he has already done the loudest thing in the sport. Skip.

Yes, sir. Zero games. Zero. Not one, at any level, anywhere, and they handed him the keys. Twenty-eight years old, running a franchise. This is the NFL, not a fantasy league. It is not a mock draft. It is not a channel. It is the National Football League and they gave a piece of it to a man whose whole résumé is uploads.

There are three things people keep conflating and I’d like to take them apart. Playing experience. Coaching experience. Evaluation experience. He has the third one and not the first two, and only one of those three has ever predicted anything about how a team performs, and it is not the one everybody leads with.

Which one is it, Mina?

None of them, reliably. That cuts against me as hard as it cuts against you.

The thing I keep going back to is that thirty-two people in this league have final say over a roster, and you can audit the published work of exactly one of them. Seven years of it, dated, still online, because he never took any of it down. That is not an argument that he is good. It is an argument that we are about to find out in public, which is not how this normally goes for anybody.

I’ve watched them. I’ve watched a lot of them. You know what a video is? It’s a man alone in an apartment being right with nobody sitting across from him. Nobody ever had to look at him and tell him no. Nobody ever made him be wrong out loud on a Monday and then come back in on the Tuesday.

To be fair to him — to be fair to him — the man has no history. None. Zero history in a professional football building, and he has never once lied about that, not in one interview, not in one video, and I respect that a good deal more than some of you would expect me to. However. However! My problem this morning is not that young man. My problem is a family that ran a real search, that sat in rooms with Todd Monken and Chris Shula, with men who have given this twenty-five and thirty years of their lives, who have moved their children four times for jobs that do not pay what people at home think they pay. And then they hired the man who came through that door to talk about a job in the scouting department. He came through that door for a job — a job! — and they gave him the building. Blasphemous.

Can I put one up? This is his. October of 2023, still up, anybody can pull it. Watch the cursor. Watch — right there — he is not drawing the coverage. He’s drawing where the guard’s helmet ends up.

That’s a teaching drawing. Not an evaluation drawing. I watched eleven of these Wednesday night instead of sleeping. He hasn’t done this. Fine. Watch the drawing.

He has a lovely cursor, Dan.

That got a laugh out of one person and it was Skip, and he is looking around for a second one.

Here is the part I can’t do anything with, and it’s the charge that will outlast every other one. A lot of people are saying he did yesterday to buy himself a year of cover. There is no result, in either direction, that settles it. If they win games, he was shrewd. If they lose games, he made day two about himself. Nothing that happens between now and December tells you which of those was true, so people are going to be saying it in December.

Because it is true and everybody at this desk knows it is true.

It might be. That is what I said. Nobody can show me.

I have been told all morning that I am being unfair to a young man who has not coached a game. So now I double down. He made himself the most famous man in this sport in ninety seconds and he has not coached a practice. Ninety seconds.

He does not finish next season holding both of those titles. Not both of them. And a family sitting on four generations of money made this decision in about three weeks. Three weeks. Just makes you wonder.

Hour two we do the football, and Skip stays, and I am told our phone lines have not stopped since eight.

Ninety minutes in and nobody at this desk has said one word about September, which I don’t think has happened here before.

Because there is nothing to say yet. Two quarterbacks, neither of whom has started ten games. No general manager over him. Nobody in that place he had met a week ago. And he is the man who decides which of the two plays, and he is the man who grades how it went.

You have two quarterbacks, which means you have no quarterback, and I have been saying that about that franchise since Tim Couch, and every single year they find a brand-new way to prove it to me.

The cap is where I would look first and I’d hedge, because the league hasn’t set the number yet. The projection is right around three hundred million. Of that, $117.6 million is committed to a player who is not on the roster, so call it thirty-nine cents out of every dollar they can spend this year.

And I want to be careful about the record part, because it is being said wrong everywhere. It is the biggest charge any one player has ever left on a team’s books. The part with no precedent is not the size. Denver ate roughly eighty-five million on Russell Wilson and split it over two seasons. None of this one is spread out.

They’re light up front and it is going to show in November when the games get heavy.

Garrett is a top-five player in this sport and there is nothing behind him. Nothing. Watch third and six in October when they’re shopping in the second week of free agency.

Myles Garrett is one of the five best football players alive. Fun to be around, too. I have loved watching that man play since Texas A&M, and he is about to spend a year getting blocked by two people at a time while somebody who makes videos calls it a plan.

Oh, here we go.

Nick Uploads.

You have been sitting on that since nine o’clock and I watched you wait for it.

I have, and I am not dropping it. I will be saying it in December and I will be saying it the day they fire him.

One more and then I’ll stop. Sanders, last November, third down. Watch his back foot. Right there. That’s late, and it is late on every one of these.

You can fix that. That’s a coaching job. Somebody has to be able to do it and I don’t know who that is over there.

And they extended Denzel Ward for sixty-two million dollars on January second, and the general manager who signed that deal was fired three days later. Whatever anyone thinks of the hire, the money on that roster was already a problem before anybody said a word into a microphone yesterday.

And here is what nobody at this table has said this morning, so I will say it. There are assistant coaches in this league right now, in Buffalo and in Green Bay and in Kansas City, on their fourth city, who have been told for twenty years that if you put the hours in and stay ready the phone eventually rings. That is the arrangement. And a family that has owned this football team for three weeks told every one of those men that the ladder was never the point. Now. Do I believe that quarterback should have been released? I do, and I said so yesterday. Do I believe the people who traded for him ought to be within a hundred miles of a football team? I do not, and I never have. But when you ask me whether a man that age who has done none of it belongs in that chair in Cleveland, I’m giving you the same answer I gave you on Wednesday and it has not improved overnight. He’s a child. I have suits older than this man.

Final takes, and we are already ninety seconds over, so keep them shorter than you want to.