The Cleveland QB enters the final year of his fully guaranteed $230 million deal. Plus, the NFL playing internationally, the Vikings’ GM search and more.
Deshaun Watson enters the final year of his fully-guaranteed contract under new coach Todd Monken. | Lisa Scalfaro / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images I’m answering your questions in midair, on the way back from the NFL’s spring meetings in Orlando.
And you had some good ones this week …Browns’ owner said Watson was a “swing and a miss. ” Now they’re prepping us for him to start Week 1. What changed? Tex, I don’t think anything has changed.
It is what it is. The Browns spent three first-round picks on Deshaun Watson, and the financial meter will run to $230 million. Jimmy Haslam saying the trade was a swing and a miss is the understatement of the decade. That said, what would make that swing and a miss worse?
Giving Watson no chance under the new coaching staff, only to see him revive his career with a new team in 2027. At this point, the investment they have in the other quarterbacks on the roster is third-, fifth- and sixth-round picks and those guys cost the team relative pennies on rookie deals.to give any of those guys the season to see what they have.
If Sanders beats out Watson and is the best quarterback for the Browns in 2026, then you go with him. But if Watson is the best guy in the spring and summer, and shows even a sliver of the high-end quarterback play he put on display in Houston on the practice field, then I think the Browns owe it to themselves to give him some run in the fall and see where it goes.
What’s the minimum percentage of the team Mark Davis needs to retain to maintain controlling interest in the Raiders? Hollister, league rules require a designated controlling owner, and that owner has to have at least 30% of the team. Davis is right around 30%.
And I think this is a good place to explain further some of what Approval on several transfers of shares in the Raiders were approved at the league meeting: Silver Lake CEO Egon Durban, who’s been identified as Davis’s successor, pushed his interest from 11% to 22%; Discovery Land founder Michael Meldman bought 5.4% to get to 12.9%; Dell founder Michael Dell bought 5.3%; Blackstone founder Joseph Baratta bought 1.7%; WME CEO Ari Emanuel bought 1.4 % and TKO president Mark Shapiro bought 0.6%. But all that equity in the team didn’t come from Davis; it was sold by preexisting limited partners in the Raiders, who’ve always seemed split up a million ways.
The good news here, to me, is that Durban and Meldman, two smart guys with great business acumen, are even more deeply involved now. And Durban’s experience on the board for English soccer power Manchester City should be valuable for the Raiders as the private-equity tycoon’s influence grows.
Ed, I’m not sure when they’ll go back to Canada, but it is a little bit of a funky one, just in that I don’t know that the league feels like it’s a great area for growth. Football is already popular up there, and the previous games they had in Toronto, via the old Bills’ agreement to play there, lacked the buzz they look for in these events.
As I see it, the league’s next frontiers are probably Japan and Italy, and maybe a Middle Eastern city like Dubai . NFL EVP Peter O’Reilly singled out Japan as having potential to be the next new country the league goes to when I asked about it at the meetings on Tuesday.
And in March, the Browns and Saints secured international marketing rights for Italy, which effectively brought the European nation into the program and under the NFL’s business umbrella.49ers defensive end Nick Bosa is scheduled to have a $55 million cap hit in 2027. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn ImagesBryce, yes, Bosa has a big cap hit in 2027, at nearly $55 million. And yes, he’s coming off a torn ACL and will turn 30 that November.
Next year is also the first year of the deal done in the summer of 2023 that won’t be fully guaranteed from the outset—he has less than $1 million guaranteed for 2027. So all those points lead to a decision needing to be made. So, really, what this boils down to is how good Bosa is in 2026.
If he rings up a dozen sacks, and offenses have to double him and slide protection to him, the cash he’s due in 2027 is reasonable relative to where the market at his position has gone, and the cap numbers can be managed. If he gets hurt or slips, then we’re talking about another situation altogether.
I would say that I have no doubt that Bosa’s going to do all he can to get back to being the player he has been for most of his seven years in the NFL. When do you expect the Vikings to make a GM hire, and do you foresee knowing who the finalists are?
Nick, the Vikings used the past couple of days to take a deep breath and push public focus to the Twin Cities being awarded the 2028 draft at the NFL spring meetings. On Monday, the team’s brass did meet to regroup, with eight introductory one-hour Zoom meetings done with the initial group of candidates—a list that went from six to five, when Chargers assistant GM Chad Alexander pulled out, then up to eight, with three candidates added late after the group was a little underwhelmed with a couple of the guys on the first list.
Anyway, I’d expect that we’ll know who the finalists are by the end of the week, and that in-person interviews will happen after the holiday weekend. Whenever people talk about expanding the schedule, I’m always surprised by how often a full international slate gets mentioned. It feels like 17 games are already set up perfectly for a full international slate. 8 home, 8 away, 1 neutral.
Foster, yes, from a football standpoint, you’d be right—having the 17th game, if you’re going to have every team go abroad once a year , would be the best thing to have a level playing field competitively, since everyone would be playing an equal number of home and away games every year in that case. But that’s not what this is about.
It’s about the total inventory of games, and the number of masters the NFL is now serving, and international certainly isn’t the only one. Simply, if the NFL is working with 288 regular-season games, rather than 272, it will have great flexibility to create a schedule allowing for 16 international games, while still filling all the different broadcast windows the league has created.
Barring injury and considering Dennis Allen’s defense, who starts the season as CB2 for the Bears? Given Ben Johnson’s offensive scheme, what chance does Logan Jones have to win the opening-day center spot? I think, ideally, the presence of rookie Malik Muhammad, who has a lot of untapped potential, pushes Tyrique Stevenson to rebound from a not-great 2025, and then you pick the best of the two.
And I do think Stevenson starts opening day, but could have a hard time holding off Muhammad. As for the center spot, it wouldn’t stun me in the least if Logan Jones finds a way to beat out Garrett Bradbury, who’s a good stopgap, but not a long-term fix. Were the Seahawks not considered for the Melbourne game? Or did the Super Bowl win make that hard to schedule?
They were awarded marketing rights to Australia and New Zealand last year and lobbied for the game pretty hard. Curtis, remember, the Rams were designated the home team in early February 2025, at which point the Seahawks were coming off their second consecutive playoff-less season and were a far less attractive candidate to go to the other side of the Pacific. Since then, of course, Seattle won the Super Bowl.
And with the reigning champion traditionally opening the season at home in the kickoff game, and the Australia game locked in for Week 1 , the Seahawks never made sense as the opponent.? Did the Lions’ opponent in Germany change after the deal with Fox to make the game more attractive, or was the Patriots vs. Lions matchup already set beforehand? René, I appreciate the umlauts over Hans Schroeder’s name.
And, no, I don’t think so. I think more so, it has to do with the NFL’s international marketing rights program. The Lions are one of 11 teams with rights to Germany, joined by the Falcons, Panthers, Packers, Colts, Chiefs, Patriots, Giants, Steelers, Seahawks and Buccaneers. Six of those teams—Carolina, Green Bay, Tampa Bay, Atlanta, New England and the Giants—are on Detroit’s schedule.
And of those six, only Green Bay and New England made the playoffs last year. Germany is an important market for the league, so I think they were always going to send a solid game to Munich. So, to me, this was always either the Packers or the Patriots.
I’ve appreciated your remarks on Vrabel-Russini but why do you think major networks are avoiding this topic despite the clear football issues—trade market influence, leaks, COTY votes, etc., is it because these organizations like Vrabel-Russini personally? Joseph, I don’t know what anyone’s motivation is. I do think silence from some corners has led to less responsible voices on the topic being amplified, so I’m not sure keeping quiet has the effect some people might have hoped for.
I’ve tried to speak on it responsibly while acknowledging that I’ve had relationships with the people involved, in the same way I do with hundreds of people in and around the NFL, and that I personally like and respect both Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini. And since I’ve been asked enough on this, my Coach of the Year ballot, and I’d fully allow for the AP to verify this to anyone, looked like this: Jacksonville’s Liam Coen was first, Macdonald was second, Vrabel was third, Chicago’s Ben Johnson was fourth and San Francisco’s Kyle Shanahan was fifth.
Will Quinn Ewers get a longer look in Miami this summer to be named the No. 2 QB or do you see the Dolphins bringing in someone else? Thanks very much! Bernie, Quinn Ewers has made a nice impression over the past year with his teammates, and I believe enters OTAs as the favorite to be the backup.
As such, I’d bet he’ll get a lot of run in the preseason games, and maybe toward the end of the season, too, if the Malik Willis–led Dolphins fall out of the race. I’ll wrap things up here with my old buddy Mac in Fort Worth—Mac, I’m not sure Jerry Jones is necessarily dying to get the Super Bowl back to North Texas.
And my evidence is that I think if he was really pushing for it, it would’ve happened by now, as powerful as he is. In the meantime, Jerry World has hosted a men’s Final Four, a CFP national title game, a ton of international soccer and this summer gets four World Cup matches, including a semifinal.
My take on this whole thing would be that the Joneses went through a lot to host Super Bowl XLV, even though some of the issues they had were self-inflicted, and I just don’t know that they see the juice being worth the squeeze. However, things can always change. Albert Breer is a senior writer covering the NFL for Sports Illustrated, delivering the biggest stories and breaking news from across the league.
He has been on the NFL beat since 2005 and joined SI in 2016. Breer began his career covering the New England Patriots for the MetroWest Daily News and the Boston Herald from 2005 to ’07, then covered the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News from 2007 to ’08. He worked for The Sporting News from 2008 to ’09 before returning to Massachusetts as The Boston Globe’s national NFL writer in 2009.
From 2010 to 2016, Breer served as a national reporter for NFL Network. In addition to his work at Sports Illustrated, Breer regularly appears on NBC Sports Boston, 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston, FS1 with Colin Cowherd, The Rich Eisen Show and The Dan Patrick Show. A 2002 graduate of Ohio State, Breer lives near Boston with his wife, a cardiac ICU nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, and their three children.
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