How good does Baker Mayfield actually have to be to stay with Browns?
Real starting quarterbacks, 1 through 32, in the NFL
There are 32 starting quarterback jobs in the NFL. They aren’t just a small group of All-Pros, with the rest being garbage that needs to be disposed of as quickly as possible. If at the end of the season, the Browns brain trust believes that Mayfield’s value is somewhere outside the top echelon, that does not mean that the Browns must cut him and go back to starting the DeShone Kizer’s and Brandon Weeden’s of the world.
The team that wins the Super Bowl is not always the team with the highest-paid quarterback, and in fact, if the team overpays for the quarterback, the damage it does to the salary cap may not be worth it.
When the New England Patriots won all those Super Bowls, part of the reason was that Bill Bellichick stubbornly refused to pay more than an average quarterback salary to Tom Brady.
Nick Foles was not the kiss of death for the Philadelphia Eagles. He was not a top-five quarterback.
When the Chiefs won the Super Bowl for the 2019 season, Patrick Mahomes was paid $4.5 million dollars, still on his rookie contract. Financially speaking, he was in the bottom five.
For 2020, it might be instructive to look at what the top average annual salary is, according to overthecap.com, plus the fifth-highest to round out the top five. The sixteenth highest gives us the median salary; the 28th highest is bottom five, and 32nd corresponds to the lowest starting pay.
Here are those benchmarks:
1. Patrick Mahomes $45 million/year
5. Aaron Rodgers. $33.5 million/year
16. Drew Brees, $25 million/year
28. Sam Darnold, $7.8 million/year
32. Case Keenum $6.0 million/year
No surprise that Mahomes and Rodgers are in the top five. Mahomes’ number, by the way, is misleading because his contract is 10 years long, extremely complex and the big money does not kick in until a few years from now. He’s still paid below average on the 2020 salary cap. Brees is thought of as a franchise guy, but there he is at number 16, and Case Keenum of the Browns is getting borderline starters pay.
Andrew Berry and the Browns are not going to just cave in and give Mayfield and his agent whatever they want. It’s going to be based on their best evaluation based on everything that they know after game 16 is in the books. Cleveland isn’t required to extend Mayfield this offseason, but if they like him, they will do for him what they did for Myles Garrett: Extend him without playing a lot of cheapskate, classless mind games, because that is not the identity that the Browns want to have.
Fan buzz is to either pay Mayfield a huge salary as one of the top stars of the game, or else pronounce him as a failure and send him to the XFL. In reality, there is a range of talent levels and salary levels, and Mayfield is going to fall somewhere within that range.
Mayfield’s value will be based on the alternatives. Who are the other realistic first-string quarterbacks who could start for the Browns in 2021, and what might they cost?