4 Cleveland Browns who will be key to beating Arizona Cardinals

Cleveland Browns key to winning No. 1: Baker Mayfield

As mentioned above, your quarterback is almost always going to be the biggest key to victory, but I think this week is also different for Baker Mayfield. Even though he threw for 305 yards, two touchdowns, zero interceptions, and a 72 percent completion percentage, there was a lot of criticism for the final drive on Sunday vs. the Chargers.

The Cleveland Browns got the ball back down five with 1:31 to go and no timeouts. In the first three plays of the drive, Mayfield checked the ball down and completed passes that stayed in bounds. It took the Browns 50 seconds of the drive to get 12 yards.

Bottom line, Mayfield played out of his mind for 90 percent of the game, and one bad drive drew a ton of criticism this week. I’m not saying it wasn’t deserved, but we all know Mayfield thrives on criticism, and I expect him to bounce back in a huge way.

Remember, before last week we were questioning if Case Keenum should be ready to play because the shoulder injury had made him so inaccurate the prior two weeks.

The running game will be a huge focus once again to drain the clock and wear down the defense, but this will likely be another high-scoring game which means Mayfield will have to make some big throws for the Browns to win.

I think this will be another game where the last team with the ball will have a chance to win, and Mayfield needs to be ready to perform better than last week. Things should end differently this week and the Browns will hand the Cardinals their first loss of the season.