Al Michaels Said the Broadcast Did Not Need to Revisit Deshaun Watson’s Past. The Reaction Was Immediate
Deshaun Watson has been the most argued-about quarterback in football for four years. On Thursday night, Al Michaels decided the Prime Video broadcast was going to skip it.
“We don’t need to go through the whole Deshaun Watson thing,” Michaels said on the air during Cleveland’s 27-24 win over Pittsburgh.
Social media disagreed, loudly.
The criticism
Ben Cummins called it “an embarrassing statement.” Warren Sharp asked whether Michaels was “trying to convince us the trade for Deshaun Watson worked out well.”
Both reactions get at the same thing. A broadcast can reasonably decide not to relitigate a player’s off-field history every week. What it cannot do is treat a $230 million fully guaranteed contract as uncontroversial background noise while the player is on the field in front of a national audience.
Worth being precise: Kirk Herbstreit’s own wording on the subject was not quoted in the coverage, so the line belongs to Michaels alone.
The record, stated carefully
Watson faced 27 civil lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct during massage sessions. He served an 11-game NFL suspension and paid a $5 million fine under a settlement with the league.
Two Texas grand juries declined to indict him. He was never criminally charged, and there has been no criminal finding against him.
Those facts belong together, in that order, every time this comes up. The civil cases and the league discipline are real. So is the absence of any criminal charge.
The football case is its own argument
Michaels’ remark landed in a week when Watson was actually playing well, which is part of why it drew attention.
Watson entered the Steelers game having led Cleveland to three consecutive wins, including two game-winning drives. The Browns beat Pittsburgh 27-24 on a 56-yard Andre Szmyt field goal with 10 seconds left and moved to 3-1, first place in the AFC North.
The longer view is uglier. Across his Browns tenure Watson has played 19 games with 19 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. He ranked last in Pro Football Network’s QB Impact Metric in 2024.
So the trade has not worked out well by any normal measure, and three straight wins in October 2026 do not change the ledger on a fully guaranteed $230 million deal.
Nobody has responded
No statement has come from Michaels, Herbstreit, Amazon or Prime Video, or the Browns. There has been no on-air correction and no discipline of any kind, and none would be expected for a broadcast opinion.
Our take
Michaels has called more significant football than almost anybody alive. He has earned the right to decide what a broadcast spends time on, and there is a real argument that rehashing a four-year-old story in the second quarter of a divisional game serves nobody.
But “we don’t need to go through the whole thing” is the wrong formulation. It sounds like a man waving off a subject rather than a broadcast making an editorial choice. Say it once, accurately and briefly, and move on. That costs 15 seconds and avoids the appearance of sanitizing.
The alternative is what happened Thursday, where the attempt to not discuss it became the thing everyone discussed.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
