The Cleveland Browns fans spent the preseason paying premium prices just to watch Shedeur Sanders warm up. Ticket costs for the rookie’s starts climbed as high as $324 a seat, with get-in prices more than doubling in a matter of days. But when head coach Todd Monken named Deshaun Watson the Week 1 starter over Sanders, that demand evaporated just as fast.

“Browns home ticket prices plummeted down to over half once they announced Shedeur Sanders won’t be starting,” a Shedeur Sanders fan account posted on X, sharing podcaster Dave Grendzynski’s September 6 video on the Browns’ games and ticket prices.

Todd Monken finally put an end to the guessing game last month. After months of back and forth, he named Deshaun Watson his starting quarterback for the season, pushing Shedeur Sanders into the backup role. It wasn’t exactly a popular call. Plenty of fans and media voices had been pushing hard. But if the noise bothered Monken, he didn’t show it.

“Absolutely not,” Monken told reporters Tuesday when discussing whether outside opinions would impact his decision. “Would I prefer that we were all on the same page? Yeah, but that has nothing to do with my decision, and it can’t ever have anything to do with my decisions. My decision has to be what’s best for the Browns Week One, all the way through the season, and as long as I’m the head coach here.”

Fans, it seems, are showing how they feel with their money instead of their words.

Ticket prices across the board have taken a noticeable dip since the announcement. Grendzynski broke down the numbers, and they tell a pretty clear story. The Carolina home opener, once going for $55 to $64, is now sitting at $35. The Pittsburgh Thursday night matchup dropped from a range of $88 to $98 all the way down to $70.

Baltimore tickets from $58 to $73 fell down to just $45, and the Houston game is now a bargain at $19. Grendzynski pulled these figures from Vivid Seats, the same site he checked three months back, and a quick look at SeatGeek showed the same pattern playing out there too.

It’s not just tickets either. A new Action Network study looked at over 539,000 ticket listings across the league and found that a family of four heading to Huntington Bank Field can expect to spend around $823.13 total for tickets, food, drinks, and parking. That’s the cheapest game day experience in the entire NFL.

So the pressure is on Watson to give fans a reason to come back. He’s trying to steer Cleveland away from last year’s brutal 5-12 finish, but his own numbers with this team haven’t exactly silenced the doubters: just 19 touchdowns across 19 regular-season appearances heading into the final year of his $230 million deal, with just a 9-10 record as Cleveland’s starter.

The bigger worry is health. Watson hasn’t finished a full regular season since 2022. He even ruptured his right Achilles in 2024, and he missed all of 2025 after re-rupturing it.

Meanwhile, Sanders started eight games in 2025 as a rookie, throwing for 1,400 yards and seven touchdowns, but failed to secure the starting role heading into 2026. Plenty of fans clearly haven’t made peace with that.

Watson’s preseason has been up and down. He looked sharp against the Bears, going 11 of 15 for 126 yards with a 98.2 rating and no turnovers. But the Bills game was rough: just 5 of 12 for 36 yards, an interception, and a 14.6 rating, and he sat out the Patriots finale entirely.

Watson called his final season “a blessing” and “an honor,” saying he works hard daily to “put out the best product I can on the field.”

Now the real question is whether cheaper tickets translate into fuller stands, and whether Watson can give Browns fans something worth showing up for.