All things considered, Deshaun Watson and the Cleveland Browns got off pretty lightly even with the additional suspension and fine. They length of suspension went from six games to 11 games but that's much better than the rumored threat of a full season on the sidelines.

That would have kept Deshaun Watson off the field for two whole seasons. Instead, he's now slated to return just past the halfway point of the 2022 campaign against the very team that traded him in the first place. The relatively light sentence had a handful of voices calling out Roger Goodell and the NFL for barking worse than they were actually going to bite.

According to NFL reporter Charles Robinson, the underlying reasons behind the league pulling back their punches against Deshaun Watson lie beyond the case in of itself – it's what would happen afterwards if they pushed for a year-long suspension.

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Watson's camp, backed by the NFLPA would have likely retaliated which would have led to two great fears potentially manifesting for the NFL and its owners, per Robinson.

The first reason would be that the league would face a prolonged legal battle. Watson's case has been far from the NFL's only off-field issue and even a multi-billion dollar company feels the pangs of an exponentially growing legal bill.

The second would be that keeping the Deshaun Watson case on the docket could potentially open a can of worms. The NFLPA was reportedly sitting on threat of opening up the archives against past owners who encountered similar moral and legal trouble and matching up the punishment that they received versus that of Watson or other players. The threat of reviving and compiling several past instances simply to serve as precedent ammunition was not an appealing idea to Roger Goodell and the NFL.