Sticking with Baker Mayfield best plan for Cleveland Browns
By John Suchan
Newsflash: Baker Mayfield is a good quarterback
No, he isn’t the best in the league and yes he was the No. 1 draft pick in 2018. There’s a lot of pressure that goes with that status. We also know that Mayfield is a very emotional guy. It’s one of the qualities that make folks either love him or hate him.
But he has had a good career to this point. He’s 29-27 with the Browns. He also is on his fourth coach in those four years. When he had his rookie season and produced 27 touchdowns, the expectations started getting skewed early for him. He fell back to Earth in his sophomore campaign and threw 21 interceptions.
The Browns then hired coach Kevin Stefanski and Mayfield learned to take care of the ball again and only threw eight picks in 2020. This season has been down statistically as he only has 10 touchdowns on the season. But he’s also only turned the ball over six times. His completion percentage is the best in his career at 64 percent.
With his current injury status, his season isn’t likely what it might be if he were 100 percent healthy. That’s not making an excuse for some of Mayfield’s up and down season, but it needs to be considered in this debate.
There hasn’t been a quarterback that has lasted in Cleveland as long as Mayfield has. Some forget that even before 1999, the Browns didn’t have a bunch of quarterbacks that were legends. In my generation, there have been Brian Sipe and Bernie Kosar. The funny thing about Kosar, for me, is that when going back and watch games, like the AFC Championship Game in January of 1987, when the Browns battled the Denver Broncos, everyone focuses on “The Drive”, and the heartbreaking Browns loss, Kosar threw two terrible interceptions that made the game closer then it should have been.
He also threw two interceptions the week prior in the AFC Divisional Game against the New York Jets that the Browns won in double overtime. Can you imagine if we had social media and cellphones then? Kosar would have been run out of town after that season and the Browns wouldn’t have gone to two more AFC Championship games.
It’s wishful thinking that those that are hellbent on running Mayfield out of Cleveland would reverse their thought process, but I believe the Browns organization is a bit more levelheaded in their decision for keeping Mayfield here in Cleveland for a long time.