The Browns restructured Deshaun Watson’s contract. According to what I’m reading, this restructure spreads out Watson’s cap hits at the end of the contract. 

Another restructure could come this offseason to address the $73M cap hit for 2025 (likely to happen). 

For this one, the Browns added another year onto the contract (no new money) in order to spread the cap hits over an additional season. 

We’ll never pretend to be cap experts, but @JackDuffin and others said this opens the door for the Browns to cut Watson in 2026 with a much more manageable financial impact. 

The biggest takeaway from this is the Browns clearly aren’t planning to rebuild and tear the roster down to the studs. If they weren’t expecting to have highly-paid contracts on the roster, they would just eat the cap hits over the next two seasons and be done.