When Deshaun Watson went down with a season-ending Achilles injury, Michelle Beadle would’ve cheered like she’s never cheered before.
But the former ESPN personality, now a mainstay on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Radio, opined Monday that she wouldn’t have waited until this past Sunday to have booed Watson. Nor would Beadle have used the Cleveland Browns quarterback’s brutal start to the season as an excuse to do so.
In fact, she would’ve booed Watson the minute he arrived in ‘The Land,’ specifically because of his off-the-field transgressions that include 20-plus sexual misconduct claims and settlements. This past September, a new woman filed a lawsuit alleging sexual assault and battery in October 2020, unrelated to a massage. Watson, through his lawyer, denied those charges.
That’s why sports media personalities like Jemele Hill, Danny Parkins and Chris Canty refused to stand idly by and let Watson’s Browns teammates try to rewrite history, turning him into an upstanding citizen who’s a victim in all of this. They all concluded that the fans cheering weren’t in the right either, though.
That’s where Beadle differs from her colleagues.
“The fans think that because they pay their money, they can do or say whatever they want out loud,” Beadle told her co-host, Cody Decker. “That’s exactly what Deshaun Watson did. He did whatever he wanted, and then he paid some money to make a problem go away. I would’ve cheered my a** off. Here’s the problem — I would’ve been booing Deshaun Watson the minute they brought him to Cleveland.
“The fans were put in a garbage situation, and if you talk to a lot of Browns’ fans, they don’t like him; they never liked him. They hated the move by the organization, and they didn’t want to be forced to cheer for this person, who they don’t find to be a decent human.
“I think what the Cleveland Browns players did yesterday was reprehensible. You want to stand by your dude? You can do it with minimal words. What I don’t need is for you to canonize the guy in front of cameras and microphones, and act like we’re wrong for not liking him, or we’re the world against Deshaun Watson.
“The way people feel about Deshaun Watson has nothing to do with his Achilles or his play as a quarterback. It has to do everything with what he’s been accused and what he has settled with dozens of women for doing — and that’s what we know of.”
What we also know is that Beadle is far from alone in her stance, even if she might be the only person in the industry claiming — at least out loud — that the fans have a right to cheer/boo Watson’s injury.
It’s not about his Achilles injury or his performance on the field — it’s about the mountain of accusations he’s faced off it. His arrival in Cleveland was already stained, and for Beadle and many others, no on-field success could ever wash that away.
When the Browns’ players went public in support of Watson, attempting to turn him into a sympathetic figure, it struck a nerve. For many, including Beadle, that felt like an erasure of the alleged victims, a dismissal of the legal and moral cloud that continues to hang over Watson.
To Beadle, the idea that teammates could gloss over his past and encourage fans to see him as the victim was “reprehensible.”
While Watson might find defenders in his locker room and among some fans, it’s clear that his off-the-field transgressions cast a long shadow that some, like Beadle, refuse to ignore.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.