Baker Mayfield to blame for Browns struggles says Colin Cowherd

FS1 radio personality Colin Cowherd wants Baker Mayfield to be a bad quarterback in the worst way and says he’s to blame for the Cleveland Browns latest loss

Why be right when you can be consistent? Colin Cowherd has been on a never-ending anti-Baker Mayfield rant since the Heisman Trophy winner’s Oklahoma days.

Since then, Mayfield went first overall in the draft — just as Cowherd said he wouldn’t — and set the NFL record for most touchdown passes by a rookie with 27 (despite not starting until Week 4). He also led his Cleveland Browns to a win over the New York Jets last season, defeating Cowherd’s  favorite young quarterback Sam Darnold in the process.

Despite anything Mayfield has done, Cowherd remains unchanged in his opinion and thinks No. 6 is a major problem in Cleveland. In fact, he says he’s the reason they lost their Week 6 game against the Seattle Seahawks claiming the judgement of the signal-caller is the reason they were defeated.

Even worse than saying Mayfield’s judgement was to blame, he also tried to say that Baker put the onus on the refs — which is just untrue.

Yes, Mayfield did put the officials on blast for the way they called the game, but he needed to. For whatever reason, they have been making some horrendous calls against Cleveland and it dates back to last season — actually it goes beyond that, but we are specifically talking about what Mayfield has seen.

In his first start last year, the refs overturned a first-down run by Nick Chubb which would have ended the game against the Oakland Raiders. Instead, it went to overtime thanks to the bad call and Oakland wound up winning the game. There was also the time Mayfield was hit helmet-to-helmet and the refs said that was fine because he was a runner, thus hitting him in the helmet was legal.

Those issues with the refs has continued this season and in this game, we saw a bogus block in the back call on Jarvis Landry and on the final scoring drive for the Seahawks, Morgan Burnett was called for a horse collar despite him not using the collar to tackle.

That’s the reason Mayfield called the refs out and said they were off their game. However, he said clear as day that their missed calls were not the reason for the loss.

"“The refs are never an excuse, but I’ll probably be fined for saying this, but it was pretty bad out there,” he said via Daryl Ruiter. “Kinda ticks me off.”"

That’s not good enough for Cowherd who simply wants to be right about Mayfield so bad that he’ll reach here and claim the quarterback was to blame despite him moving the ball well for the majority of the game but had some bad breaks, including an interception that went right off the hands of running back Dontrell Hilliard.

The fact is, the Browns have a lot to fix during the offseason and Mayfield himself needs to clean up some of his decisions. Even so, blaming him for their loss when the defense gave up 32 is one of the most Cowherd-esque things to attempt.