Fan reaction very mixed for Cleveland Browns’ Deshaun Watson

Fans should not have been surprised at the lack of reception for Deshaun Watson.

If you follow a few Cleveland Browns fans and journalists on Twitter, you may notice how some are serving as Deshaun Watson’s personal PR team. It’s cute if it didn’t make me want to vomit. I’m never going to ask anyone to not root for a team they like, I’m just asking you not to make excuses for the people on the team when they have shown to be less than stellar human beings.

Some people can’t do this, and it’s sad. A lot can, and I get that.

Saturday was the first day fans would be allowed into practice to watch the Cleveland Browns do their thing, and it turns out that when people saw Watson come out to take the field, he got a less than warm reception. It was a tepid response, but whoever is running the Cleveland.com Twitter account just needed to goose the reception.

Even if Cleveland.com’s very own Chris Fedor pointed out that it was a terrible response. I mean, I get Brian Hoyer getting a louder reaction, he’s from here. Brandon Weedon? Yikes.

The AP is another outlet that pointed out the muted and tepid response that Watson got, and they’re as center as it gets on the news.

It’s going to be hard for Deshaun Watson to win over fans

Winning doesn’t cure all. There are still basketball fans who dislike Kobe Bryant for the 2004 incident. That was in a noticeably less contentious time period to boot. These days fans are so dug in on a variety of issues that once they establish their emotional base, they won’t be moved from it.

The idea that if Watson does well that he’ll just convert all of these fans into football-worshipping fans is just silly. That’s not going to happen.

Yet, if Watson struggles, fans will turn on him, as fanbases have been proven to be particularly fickle. So anyone thinking that Watson is just going to wash off the critics with a few wins have got another thing coming.