Where Baker Mayfield ranks in Browns history

Baker Mayfield did a lot for the Cleveland Browns in his four seasons with them, but how will he be ranked against other quarterbacks in the team’s history?

We finally saw the trade where the Cleveland Browns sent quarterback Baker Mayfiel to his new team.

This puts to bed some of the ongoing crazy chatter from the social media critics and supporters of No. 6. There are several different opinions on Mayfield and what he meant to the Browns and how he helped and didn’t help the team out over the four seasons he was with the team.

There are also questions about how we should look at Mayfield’s accomplishments and the lack thereof.

We are all very versed in the 30 or more quarterbacks that came before Mayfield since the team returned in 1999 following a brief hiatus as a franchise. While Mayfield certainly will be given credit in many areas and deservedly so, there were many flaws in his game on and off the field that will be analyzed for years to come.

Compared to recent quarterbacks that have run through Cleveland like a leaky faucet with a constant drip, the band-aid that Mayfield put over the problem at quarterback is an accomplishment in itself. But are we just giving him more credit than he deserves because the team did better with him behind center?

Yes, the Browns were 1-31 in the two seasons prior to Mayfield, but there have been some outstanding quarterbacks in the history of the franchise. Let’s first look back at a few of those and then we’ll see how Mayfield stacks up against them with his own statistics.

Baker Mayfield ranking in Cleveland Browns history

The competition: Bernie Kosar 1985-1993

We’ll begin and end with the name Otto Graham who was the Browns quarterback from 1945 to 1954. He is and will for now be the No. 1 quarterback in any Browns rankings of quarterbacks. Yes, Graham played in a different era but his accomplishments, regardless of time need to be respected.

Beyond Graham, there are quarterbacks with names like Bernie Kosar, Frank Ryan, and Brian Sipe that have to be considered when ranking the rest of the bunch.

Kosar is beloved by the Browns fans around the world. Some of that has to do with the fact that Kosar is from Northeastern Ohio and wanted to play for the Browns back in the mid-1980s when he was coming out of college.

The team was pretty successful during Kosar’s time. They made it to three AFC Championship games but lost all three contests. When you go back and look at Kosar’s numbers you see a quarterback that did a lot to help his team but also a quarterback that made many mistakes along the way and would get bailed out by his teammates playing on the defensive side of the ball.

In the exciting Cleveland playoff win over the New York Jets in the double-overtime thriller in January of 1987, Kosar nearly lost the game by throwing an interception in the endzone at the end of regulation. That gets lost in the euphoria of the win.

By the numbers, Kosar finished with a record of 53-51-1. He had 21,904 passing yards and 116 touchdowns thrown in nine seasons. He also threw 81 interceptions.

Of his nine seasons, only four were winning ones and those were all between 1986 and 1989. The best year was in the 1986 season when Cleveland finished at 12-4. The last four seasons were losing ones.

In 1990 the team went 3-10 in Kosar’s starts and the following year the Browns went 6-10. So, while the stories today, suggest an icon of a sports hero, Kosar’s career in Cleveland was a mixed bag.