The Cleveland Browns are more than familiar with the Baker Mayfield experience. He'll alternate great games with head-scratching ones, and there's no telling which version of him you'll get, not even on the same drive.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers made their bed with him. They just gave Mayfield a three-year, $165 million contract before the start of the season, and they might be regretting that decision after watching him get outplayed by Deshaun Watson.
Mayfield led an erratic Bucs offense in Week 2, and while three holding penalties proved to be critical, including one on the final drive, head coach Todd Bowles blamed the quarterback, not the offensive line.
In all honesty, it sounded a bit like deja vu:
"Two of them for sure on third down, there is a lot of scrambling going on,” Bowles said. "Then after that it is kind of a crap shoot and you have to have kind of a feel for when to let go and when that guy is tugging back going back the other way. So that made it kind of tough. ... [Mayfield's] been scrambling for a while, and the guys have gotten used to it. But we just can’t have the penalties.”
The Browns were right to move on from Baker Mayfield even if they got the replacement wrong
These are the types of comments and games that show that Baker Mayfield is still the same guy the Browns had in the building. He may have matured to some degree, but he continues to make the same mistakes that often stood in his way when he was in Berea.
Of course, Monday morning quarterbacks will all agree that replacing him with Deshaun Watson was a catastrophe. But even though that move aged like bad milk, it's hard to believe Mayfield would have led this team to the top of the AFC.
If anything, leaving Cleveland was the best thing that could have happened to Mayfield. He got the benefit of the doubt, with everyone blaming the Browns' dysfunction for his failures, as if he had nothing to do with it.
To be fair, the Browns did do Mayfield dirty. He deserved better after playing for a revolving door of offensive coordinators and leading the team to its first playoff win in decades.
Revisionists will claim the Browns should have kept him, citing his resurgence in Tampa Bay and how poorly things went in Berea, as if things were always great with the former No. 1 pick. As if he hadn't ostracized the fan base, the media, and even the locker room with his antics and larger-than-life persona. As if he always saw eye-to-eye with then-head coach Kevin Stefanski.
What everyone seems to ignore is the fact that Baker Mayfield is the same quarterback who entered the league out of Oklahoma. He might even be the same guy who was forced to leave Texas Tech to pursue other opportunities.
Nothing has changed except his uniform. People think he's doing better because he doesn't play in Cleveland anymore, but Browns fans know better than to fall for this propaganda.
Just because the Deshaun Watson experiment was a disaster doesn't mean the team was wrong to pursue an upgrade. It's just how they went about it that deserved criticism.
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