After showing up off the street in the middle of the season and leading Cleveland to the playoffs in 2023, Joe Flacco is heading for free agency in 2024. Whether the Browns re-sign him to back up Deshaun Watson remains to be seen.
Browns General Manager Andrew Berry noted that the situation with Flacco this year is similar to the situation with Jacoby Brissett last year: Brissett played well enough for the Browns to earn a one-year, $8 million contract with the Commanders, and that wasn’t an investment the Browns felt they could make given what they’re already spending on Deshaun Watson.
“We’d absolutely love to have Joe back,” Berry said, via the Akron Beacon-Journal. “He’s a good quarterback, but I guess maybe a little bit similar to Jacoby last year. It depends, right? I want to bring all of our good players back, but there are constraints to that. I’m really kind of both sides of the aisle but would have no problem having Joe back.”
Those constraints are primarily about the salary cap. Flacco might want to go somewhere that he can compete for a starting job, and the Browns might not think they can justify the cap space it would take to pay Flacco, given that Watson has a whopping $64 million cap hit in 2024. When you’re paying that kind of cap space for your starting quarterback, you can’t devote a whole lot of cap space for your backup, or else you’re not going to have enough left for everyone else on the roster.
Realistically, the Browns may decide that they have to go into 2024 with just Watson and Dorian Thompson-Robinson on the 53-player roster. And they’ll hope that Watson stays healthier and plays better than he has so far in his tenure in Cleveland.