What if the Cleveland Browns had started Baker Mayfield in Week 1 last year?

Former head coach Hue Jackson stubbornly refused to let Baker Mayfield compete for the Cleveland Browns starting job as a rookie. But what if he let him try?

Could  Baker Mayfield have led the Cleveland Browns to the playoffs last year if only coach Hue Jackson had held a quarterback competition in preseason? Could he have saved his job by anointing Baker Mayfield as the first string quarterback from the get-go, rather than Tyrod Taylor?

You’ve probably had this conversation multiple times in your favorite Browns watering hole, or even on the comments section of Dawg Pound Daily? If Mayfield had had a chance to start earlier, could he have made a difference?

It sounds very appealing. After all, the nature of summer camp to compete for jobs, so it seems almost un-American to assign a first string job to a player without free and open competition.

Well, we can never know for sure, but this analyst believes that bad coaching trumps good quarterbacking, and starting Mayfield would probably not have saved our beloved former coach. It’s more likely the other way around. If the Browns had kept the coaching staff intact, with Mayfield as the starter, the Browns could have still found ways to lose, Baker would have been pounded by opposing defenses, and this year we would be debating whether to draft Kyler Murray or not.

First of all, let’s be clear that Mayfield was capable of starting Week 1 in the NFL. He had had four years as a starter, one at Texas Tech, and three more at Oklahoma, plus one season in limbo while transferring. That is usually a good formula for success. Bill Parcells used to have seven criteria for drafting quarterbacks:

1.  Be a three-year starter.

2.  Be a senior in college.

3.  Graduate from college.

4.  Start 30 games.

5.  Win 23 games.

6.  Post a 2:1 touchdown-to-interception ratio.

7.  Complete at least 60-percent of passes thrown.

Mayfield, of course, had a perfect score and in fact killed it with four years as a starter, 39-8 won-loss, 4.37 TD/INT ratio, and 68.5 percent completion percentage. So there was very good reason to believe he was ready (in case you’re interested, the only other major QB to meet Parcells’ criteria was Mason Rudolph of the Steelers, but he wasn’t even drafted in Round 1).

So if Mayfield was a good choice to start, how bad was Tyrod Taylor?  Do you remember how many games Taylor actually lost for the Browns as the starter?

Six? Three? Two? No. The answer is only one. Tyrod Taylor lost only one game as a starter last year, with one tie versus Pittsburgh and a poor game against the Jets which Mayfield saved in relief. But for the season, Taylor lost only one game as the starter.

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It’s very hard to hang the team’s inability to make the playoffs on a guy who had one loss as a starting quarterback. Taylor was ineffective, but one loss did not kill the season.

The Browns were a bad team getting worse under the direction of Hue Jackson and his trusted (or is it mistrusted?) offensive coordinator Todd Haley. Taylor (13) and Mayfield (20) combined for 33 sacks in the first 8 games. That’s a rate of 66 per year, which would have been the worst in the NFL. That’s 10 more than Tim Couch ever took in a single season.

One sack is not that big a deal for a young athlete. They can usually recover from that. But if you take multiple sacks game after game, the body doesn’t have the same chance to heal. Baker took five sacks in three straight games (games 5-7) under H & H. That’s not how a young quarterback improves. That’s how he goes on IR.

As a practical matter, it was not crazy to start Tyrod Taylor, based on the fact that he had gotten the Buffalo Bills to the playoffs in 2017. We can question why Dorsey went out and signed a veteran QB, but under the circumstances, it made sense to not throw a rookie into a seventeen game losing streak and demand that he make the playoffs.

Moreover, a quarterback competition means that the coach does not know who the quarterback should be, and that’s usually bad. It’s not like Fantasy Football, which allows you as general manager to trade for a player and start him the same week and have him perform. In the real world, it matters how much experience the player has, and reps with the first string in summer camp gives the player an edge.

Taylor was an established veteran but had no experience with the new Haley-led offense or with any of the Browns players. Same for Mayfield of course. If you then decide to divide first-string practice reps in half, that means that the Browns QB starts out behind and then falls either further behind compared to other teams. How can it be okay to not have experience with the team, and then have half the reps that Ben Roethlisberger gets with the Steelers, and then expect your guy to outduel him, especially with a team riding a seventeen game losing streak?

In 2017, the theory that practice reps are not needed was put to the test. Cody Kessler entered camp as the first string and wound up the third string. Brock Osweiler was second string, elevated to first string and then cut.

Kevin Hogan was fourth string, put up numbers in the preseason and made third string. As for DeShone Kizer, he started out third string, and completed eight passes in preseason game two and was proclaimed the starter.

Believe it or not, the Browns gave him zero game snaps in Game 4, figuring he had mastered the offense and needed the rest. The result, of course, was that Kizer was woefully unprepared and let the Browns to an 0-16 season and was subsequently thrown under the bus.

That traumatic experience led the Browns to be wary of turning the team over to another rookie, even though by all accounts Mayfield was vastly better prepared than Kizer for starting Week 1.

However, the Hue Jackson-led Browns were probably not the right team. Having been reminded that Tyrod Taylor had only one loss as the starter for Jackson, do you remember how may wins Mayfield had for him?

The answer is…only one. You will recall he got a win over Baltimore despite leading the team to only 12 points, as the Browns won in overtime 12-9 on a knuckleball field goal by Greg Joseph in overtime.  That’s it. That’s the only win that Baker got for the ‘Quarterback Whisperer’.

Hue was 3-36-1 for a reason.

If there are some positives about Coach Jackson — he did win 7 games with Jason Campbell as his quarterback in Oakland, and he had good reviews in Cincinnati and Baltimore over the years  — can we just admit that it wasn’t going well in Cleveland for him?

How was Mayfield going to save Hue and Haley?  In addition to only one win as the starter for Hue, Mayfield rang up a passer rating of only 78.9 over the first eight games. That’s quite a bit lower than Josh McCown’s rating of 85.7 for his Browns career, during which time McCown went 1-10 as the starter. Or put another way, 78.9 ranks between Blake Bortles and  Sam Darnold. That doesn’t sound like playoff football.

Now, if you’re remembering Mayfield having a great year for Jackson, hopefully, you will see a neurologist promptly because that didn’t happen. Mayfield was better than Taylor, but nowhere near playoff caliber. We can take our choice whether Hue or Haley was more to blame, but together they were trying very hard to ruin Mayfield.

If ESPN sportswriters were down on Mayfield for not hugging Hue Jackson — and they were — they should experience getting sacked fifteen unnecessary times and then see how much affection they feel for the coaches who created that situation.

The Browns are fortunate that Gregg Williams and Freddie Kitchens were available to finally bring order out of chaos. Rushing yards went up. Sacks allowed went way down. Passing yards went up — way up, as Mayfield was lights out the second half of the season, performing at an elite level. His passer rating was transformed from bottom five to top five at 108.4, or between Russell Wilson and Matt Ryan.

The old regime had to be fired in order to save young Mayfield from getting killed.  There was no way to save it.  We wish our old coach well in his future endeavors, but his dismissal, though unfortunate, was absolutely necessary and saving his job was not possible. Hue Jackson was not going to the playoffs with the Browns. 3-36-1 was not a fluke.