With the preseason rapidly approaching, Todd Monken laid out his timeline for picking the Browns’ new starting quarterback.
With Week 0 of preseason officially in the books, the pressure is on for the Cleveland Browns to pick their new starting quarterback.
In one corner is Deshaun Watson, the team’s highest-paid player who missed all of 2025 with multiple ACL injuries and has never quite matched his Houston Texans-level of play in the Midwest.
And the other? Shedeur Sanders, the 2025 Pro Bowler who remains one of the NFL’s biggest lightning rods after a polarizing college career playing for his father at Colorado.
Discussing one of the NFL’s biggest questions before Cleveland’s 2026 preseason debut, head coach Todd Monken revealed his general timeline for the decision, which likely won’t come for at least a few more weeks.
“I have not. I anticipate the next couple of days, I’m going through, they’re each going to start a game,” Monken noted. “How do I want it, that’s something we’re working through. They’re each going to start a game. We’re going to go through this week, and next week we’ll have to decide when we practice against the (Buffalo) Bills, because you’re not going to give just one practice, you’re not going to give one of the quarterbacks the ones, you’re going to have to rotate those guys some in the preseason practices. After those two games, I think we’ll be closer to having a better idea. One’s going to start one game, the other one will start the other.”
In the NFL, there’s an old adage that if you have two quarterbacks, you have none. For the 2026 Browns, they genuinely do have two, which is nice, but eventually, they will need to make a decision one way or the other, even if the “loser” will be waiting in the wings for fans to demand a change when things start to go south.
With Week 0 of preseason officially in the books, the pressure is on for the Cleveland Browns to pick their new starting quarterback. In one corner is Deshaun Watson, the team’s highest-paid player who missed all of 2025 with multiple ACL injuries and has never quite matched his Houston Texans-level of play in the Midwest.
