Why Baker Mayfield belongs in the Dawg Pound, not Deshaun Watson

Baker Mayfield is Cleveland’s hero and is not being traded

Baker Mayfield is the quarterback of the Cleveland Browns, and truthfully it feels kind of stupid to have to defend the obvious. It was truly heartbreaking to see the Twitter traffic the past few days and read about fans chattering about Deshaun Watson Truthfully, I thought about hanging up my keyboard, it felt so bad. Don’t Browns fans know what they have in Baker Mayfield?

Since 1999, the Browns have been looking for stability, continuity, and leadership, and they have it with a true star who has embraced this town and given it everything he has got. Do you so-called fans really want to blow it up and start over again?

Maybe quarterback change is addictive. Remember we used to have a picture of the Tim Couch jersey, and they kept on crossing the name off the back and adding the name of the next victim, I mean quarterback, and soon the list was so long that it was too long to keep on just one jersey? The Browns would have a new starting quarterback every year. We don’t have to go through that anymore. Just stop.

Maybe anti-Baker fans do not understand the difference between fantasy football and real life. In fantasy football, you just fire a player and hire a new guy, plug him into the lineup, and off you go. In real life, it takes time, and quarterbacks develop over a period of years.

In Cleveland, we invented the idea that quarterbacks peak at about their second or third start in their NFL careers, instead of their second or third NFL contract. Starting a rookie quarterback is usually a dumb idea. Much better to let young players develop and get better instead of blowing them up every year.

Every year of Baker Mayfield’s career he’s had a new coach and offensive coordinator and scheme to learn. Every year he has improved as the season went on. Nobody knows what might happen if he stayed in the same system longer than one year because it has never happened before. Let’s try the experiment just to see what might happen.

But just take some time to imagine how devastated the team would be if they announced that they traded Mayfield for Deshaun Watson. These are real players on the roster that worked together as a team. You can’t rip out the heart and soul of the team and expect everything would be just great. No. This fan believes that the entire team would revolt.

Player reaction would go something like this: “Is this the reward that Baker gets for playing his heart out for three years for the Cleveland Browns and winning a playoff game? You trade him to the terrible, horrible, Houston Texans organization? That’s it, we’re done here! Trade the rest of us, too! We don’t want to play here anymore.”

If the players do not burn down 76 Lou Groza Blvd, the season ticket holders will take care of it.

It should be ridiculously obvious, but it needs to be said again, football is a team game. It’s not a collection of individual athletes. How can the team ask the players to lay it on the line each week, and then just get rid of them? It would be like your Mom planning to divorce your Dad just because she met a guy who has a luxury car instead of the pickup truck your Dad drives.

Loyalty is a two-way street. This season, I’ve been saying all along that Andrew Berry and the Haslams would take their time evaluating the total performance of their quarterback, and I expect they will treat him right. They will sign him to a multi-year contract and lock him in for a long time.

Baker Mayfield is the quarterback of our team. If you do not like it, you can go jump in Lake Erie and go swimming with coach Hue Jackson.

There is not one bad thing to say about Deshaun Watson. He is a true Pro, a true gentleman, an incredible athlete, and he’s playing for a franchise that messed up by staying too long in an untenable situation with a coach and general manager combination. The team managed to trade away their first and second-round draft pick and overload the salary cap so that they will not sign many veterans this season. Things look very, very bleak and it is understandable if Watson wants out.

But it would be a terrible disservice to have him try to replace the popular Mayfield. The team wouldn’t like it, and neither would the fans. Similarly, assuming Mayfield’s final destination would be Houston, his situation would be equally uncomfortable.

Oh, but there is one quarterback controversy to promote. That is the number three quarterback.  Re-sign Garrett Gilbert! That’s the only quarterback controversy in Cleveland. Number one and number two (Case Keenum, who has been a star with Kevin Stefanski as his quarterback coach in Minnesota) are settled. Only the number three position is up for grabs.