Why the gap between the best and worst versions of Deshaun Watson is so wide (2024)

When the Texans and Ravens faced off a season ago, the game was supposed to be an exciting matchup between a pair of MVP candidates in Lamar Jackson and Deshaun Watson.

Instead, the Texans lost 41-7, their greatest defeat of 2019, as Jackson gashed Houston’s defense and Watson turned in — at least by expected points added — the worst performance of his young career.

Just as this year’s Texans will, last year’s team ebbed and flowed as their QB did, which meant never winning more than two games in a row. Quarterback rating is an imperfect stat, but it’s noteworthy that since Watson tore an ACL as a rookie, he has yet to record three straight games with a QB rating over 100. Even though practically every team would love to hand Watson the mega-extension the Texans recently did, he’s been prone to a level of inconsistency that’s occasionally resulted in immense downswings like that one that occurred against the Ravens, whom Houston hosts in Week 2.

In fact, the difference between the best and worst versions of Watson is among the widest such gaps of anyone who ranked as a Tier 1 or Tier 2 QB in a 2020 poll of executives and coaches by The Athletic’s Mike Sando.

How do we know that? Based on EPA, which you can read a primer on hereor just treat as a success metric that measures each play’s impact on the score of the game.The Athletic averaged Watson’s three worst and three best games by his total EPA on dropbacks from 2017-19, then calculated the difference between those to come up with a “variance score.”

Here’s how Watson stacked up during the past three seasons, compared to other 2020 Tier 1 and Tier 2 QBs.

(EPA data via TruMedia; VS = Variance score; figures rounded to nearest tenth)

Remember this variance score is not a measurement of game-to-game inconsistency, but rather the difference between QBs’ best and worst performances.

For both Dak Prescott and Philip Rivers, interceptions accounted for the largest shares of negative EPA in two of their bottom three performances. But that wasn’t the case for Watson, whose failings in each of his three worst games were overwhelmingly because of sacks.

(CPOE = completion percentage over expectation)

Watson’s struggles in these games were arguably more a result of his surroundings than his own decision-making. Pro Football Focus didn’t credit him with responsibility for more than two sacks in any of these contests. In the 2018 win over Buffalo, specifically, Watson barely had a chance to avoid the negative plays while operating behind arguably the league’s worst line. The Bills on average required 7.7 seconds to sack him — which is the second-fastest time of Watson’s career, according to Sportradar — though sometimes the pocket collapsed much faster than that.

The Texans finished that 2018 season last in Football Outsiders’ adjusted sack rate and knew they needed to make changes, so they traded for Laremy Tunsil and drafted Tytus Howard and Max Scharping. Head coach and now-general manager Bill O’Brien understood asking Watson to ignore his improvising instincts makes less sense than doing everything possible to protect Watson while allowing him to lean into the best version of himself. Enjoying the Texans QB’s brilliance requires living with some games featuring a lot of negative plays. The goal must be to limit the frequency of those, not eliminate them.

“Got to block to the echo of the whistle,” O’Brien said during training camp. “That’s what it’s like when you’re blocking for Deshaun. You’ve got to hold your block for a long time, because he’s going to try to keep the play alive, and that’s what makes him who he is.”

O’Brien and right guard Zach Fulton both said returning all five starters along the offensive line, a first for the Texans under their current head coach, would help in this regard. Not only are Watson’s blockers used to his pre-snap cadence, but also how he plays.

Yet any benefits of continuity were missing during the Texans’ Week 1 loss to Chiefs, who recorded 7 hits and 4 sacks on Watson while seemingly every Houston lineman struggled at times.

Week 1 tends to lead to overreactions, so don’t panic yet. This is still the same line that finished eighth in ESPN’s pass block win rate in 2019, and according to Sharp Football Stats, the Texans face the fourth-easiest slate of opposing pass rushes after taking on the fifth-easiest a season ago.

But say the group takes a step back because of a major injury or natural regression, or that it stagnates because Howard and/or Scharping don’t make second-year jumps while opponents outperform expectations. Will Watson’s big downswings appear more frequently? It’s possible.

Watson is not going to cede his never-give-up attitude, but he no longer has the ultimate safety net when plays break down in DeAndre Hopkins, whom he appeared to miss in Week 1. And by incorporating more speed into their receiving corps in an attempt to stretch defenses vertically, the Texans might ask Watson to hold onto the ball for longer, potentially exposing him to more negative plays.

“You can’t really be getting hit much more than he’s been getting hit these last two years,” said Quincy Avery, Watson’s longtime private coach. “(The Texans are) doing a better job of getting the right guys there to protect him. He’s doing a better job of taking care of himself in that way. … There’s just a fine line we’ve got to balance between being great at all those things and making all those Superman plays and understanding what people are doing before the snap, so you can be calculated in the risks you do take.”

Watson is one of the game’s best deep ball throwers, so the Texans’ desired new style of play, which wasn’t on display in Week 1, could sometimes bring out the best in him. The question the Texans will contend with this season, when they’re more reliant than ever on their QB, is how often will it also brings out the worst in him? And perhaps more importantly, how severe will the difference between the two be?

The blitz-happy Ravens, who have the cornerback depth to contend with Houston’s receivers, could provide answers.

(Photo by Todd Olszewski/Getty Images)