Bain of Terror: Preseason Week 2 Recap

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Mina Kimes** (0:34)
Welcome back to The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny.
Preseason week two is in the books. I'm joined by my friend, pre-conquest guest, Dan Pizzuta, to talk about some of the preseason action. And Dan, it's been a hell of a morning for the NFL. I promise we're going to talk about good things that happened in the preseason. We're spotlighting some fun performances. We got a look at some starting offenses. Some quarterbacks actually played. We're going to talk about the Broncos and the Packers and whatnot. We're going to talk about the young rookie quarterbacks, Mendoza and Simpson. But before we start, there's two pieces of major NFL news. One is the announcement of Deshaun Watson as the Browns starting quarterback, which we will discuss at length. And the other, I'm trying to get an actual foothold on this story, but this morning, it also broke. I'm citing ABC eyewitness news that San Francisco 49ers owner, Jed York, was arrested in Ohio for prostitution courts documents show. I'm just reading the headline.
Dan, there's going to be a lot more details that come out on this before the season, but not exactly the headline. I'm sure the league wants two weeks before the opener.

**Dan Pizzuta** (1:46)
No, no, probably not. And in the way where it happened, in small town of Ohio at 930 in the morning, the optics probably not great.
So yeah, I guess we'll probably definitely get more concrete information as that comes out, but not a great look for the 49ers.

**Mina Kimes** (2:07)
Yeah, the obvious comparison that arises here is the Robert Kraft accident. And so I think that'll be held up in terms of like the how it's handled by the league. But yeah, it's obviously a bad look.
This just came out, guys. So I just don't know. I wish I had more to say. Other than that, it's obviously a bad look for an NFL owner and a horrible look potentially. And yeah, the other thing I alluded to was the Watson news. So let's just jump right in. So the Browns, for some reason, they just didn't announce it on Sunday. They waited until Monday morning to announce that Deshaun Watson will be their starting quarterback week one. A decision met with widespread derision and anger from Browns fans. This coming off of the heels of another bad preseason performance by Watson, and we can get into that and what we actually see from him as a player. Perhaps more importantly than that, a week in which he kind of went to war with the Browns' own fan base. In the lead up to the game, he was asked about possibility that he might be booed at home. He said, I don't care. Then after the game, he was asked about the fact that he was booed, and he called it disrespectful and said that to him was more about personal things. Of course, he didn't actually say what that was as opposed to what was happening on the field.
There's so many different ways to go about this. But I want to talk about him and Sanders and what we saw from them on the field. But I think the thing I want to talk about with you first or discuss is the actual decision itself and why we think Cleveland did this. Now, the obvious explanation is they're paying him a zillion dollars still because of the worst contract in NFL history. Sure, and the fact that they had to keep extending it or they didn't have to, but they did. Yeah, I think that's part of it.
But also genuinely, part of me thinks that as bad as Watson was, organizationally, I suspect they do think he is a more predictable quarterback. Do you agree with that? I don't even know. It's hard to say who made this call, Munkin versus ownership versus whatnot.
And I'm not saying there, I would have picked Sanders and we'll talk about that in a second. But it feels to me like this was born of like Munkin being like, well, I know what I'm going to get with him. Keep the offense on time. We can bench him before we get to play at home week three. Like, what do you think went into this decision, which, you know, obviously was incredibly poorly received?