Before the Browns swooped in and persuaded quarterback Deshaun Watson to accept a trade to Cleveland, the finalists were the Saints and Falcons.
At the league meetings, Falcons owner Arthur Blank tried to downplay his team’s pursuit of Watson.
“We explored it enough to where we spent some time with him for maybe an hour and 15 minutes,” Blank said, via D. Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He and his agent and trainer or something. So I mean it got to that stage. So it was a worthwhile use of our time. We had an opportunity to understand [things] from his perspective and ask some questions and what have you. But after that, we didn’t have any really further interaction with either the Texans to speak of or with his agent.”
The Falcons didn’t need to have further interaction with the Texans because it’s been established that the Texans didn’t allow teams to meet with Watson until they satisfied Houston’s trade expectations. Thus, the Falcons already had made the offer to the Texans, and the Texans had accepted it.
That’s definitely more than exploratory.
Blank also defended the pursuit of Watson, despite the pending legal issues.
“I think for us, to the level of pursuit that we had, the exploratory stage, I think was the right thing to do,” Blank said. “Would it have made sense to go further than that? It would depend on, you know, what a much more intensive process would have revealed or discussions we would have had. . . . The word ‘explore’ is the key word. I would say exploring it, and we matched the amount of work we were doing to the word exploring. And it wasn’t more than that. It wasn’t less than that. That was the commitment we made, and we had the interview with him, and that was the last of it. So it certainly is an area of concern. ... I don’t know what the truth is. I know what Deshaun says. But I also know there are 22 allegations out there and that’s a very significant [number] and [a] serious subject. ... I don’t know what’s going to come of [the 22 cases].”
Blank creates the impression that more research would have been performed if things had progressed. But let’s play it out. If Watson had selected the Falcons as the winner of the four-way tug-of-war, what would have happened next? Would the Falcons have said, “Well, now we need to take some time to further research the 22 lawsuits pending against you?” If they had said that, Watson likely would have moved on.
Hovering over the entire situation was the Matt Ryan roster bonus. The team persuaded him to move the due date for the $7.5 million payment by four days, giving the Falcons a little extra time -- but not much -- to trade Ryan while trading for Watson. Although the Falcons traded Ryan anyway, it surely was the pursuit of Watson, exploratory or more, that drove a wedge between the Falcons and Ryan.
Remember the report from NFL Media about a restructuring of Ryan’s contract that would have dropped his 2021 cap number by $12 million? That contractual adjustment never went through. It likely never went through because, on the same day the report of a restructuring emerged, a grand jury decided not to indict Watson on any of nine criminal complaints. That sparked the land rush for Watson.
Although, as Simms has heard, Watson specifically wanted the Falcons to join the chase, the Falcons did indeed choose to get involved. It was well understood as the process reached the finish line that Watson would join the team he picked.
As that was happening, no one from the Falcons publicly or privately pushed back on the notion that it was down to Atlanta and New Orleans. That would have been the time for the Falcons to make it known that much more work needed to be done to make their “exploratory” consideration of Watson something more aggressive and definitive.
They didn’t. They didn’t because, frankly, it wasn’t exploratory. They didn’t because they wanted Watson. The only question was whether Watson wanted them. And now that the Browns are being criticized for landing Watson, Blank naturally wants to avoid any blowback for being ready to do exactly what the Browns did in welcoming Watson, without regard to his off-field entanglements.
While the process was unfolding, I wondered whether one or more of the teams that pursued Watson but didn’t land him would claim that they were troubled by the off-field issues and passed. The Falcons have stopped short of that. They’re claiming that they merely explored the possibility and that they would have had to do much more before making the trade. This implies that they could have eventually decided that they were troubled by the off-field issues and passed.
Again, if they wanted people to believe that, they should have found a way to make that point when Watson presumably was choosing between the Falcons and the Saints, with the winner welcoming him immediately -- not making him wait while more homework was done.