One can’t imagine what life is like inside Baker Mayfield’s head right now and, certainly, the banalities of a post-game press conference aren’t going to adequately summarize it.
But a quick scroll through social media, including the comments underneath the Browns’ increasingly sycophantic Twitter page, make us wonder if Mayfield really deserves it. At the end of the day, what did he really do to Browns fans? Are we to believe that he didn’t live up to their standard on how a franchise player should act, but Deshaun Watson apparently has?
The Panthers’ new quarterback said he couldn’t help it if the rest of the world made this game—a narrow loss to the Browns on a last-second field goal—into the Super Bowl, and he’s absolutely right. The singular inflammatory comment Mayfield made about the whole thing (saying that he wanted to f--- the Browns up) wasn’t done so at a podium and it was the kind of thing we’d probably all say about an employer who treated us the way the Browns treated Mayfield on the way out. You can read more of our thoughts on that matter here.
It just shows how far into a parallel universe the Browns and their fan base have traveled, codified in their ability to justify the signing of Watson and label Mayfield as some kind of enemy. Since we, as a human race, have been robbed of our ability to have a neutral take on anyone or anything anymore, Mayfield was either our failed hope at some Browns moral comeuppance or some lightning rod for the remaining Browns fan base trying to figure out why everyone roots against them now.
How unfair was that of us?
The truth is that Mayfield played all right. He threw some bad passes and he threw some good passes. He’s been in Carolina for about a month, a process that took longer than expected because the Browns were waiting for the best opportunity to trade him, and both parties were waiting on Mayfield to take less money so he could simply not be in Cleveland anymore. (Watson looked pretty bad in his preseason debut despite having much longer to prepare.) It takes time to get used to wide receivers and the nuances of an offense, and yet he still had the Panthers with a lead at the end of the game. It wasn’t his call to sit on a field goal during Carolina’s final drive instead of trying for a touchdown.
All it took was a phantom pass interference call and a fascinating on-the-fly interpretation of the intentional grounding rule to get Cleveland in a place where they could salvage a potentially embarrassing defeat.
The Browns, with or without Watson, are a better football team. They have one of the best offensive lines and offensive line coaches in the NFL. They tanked so hard for Myles Garrett that it triggered an NFL investigation after the fact. This wasn’t Joe Montana’s Chiefs coming back to play the 49ers. This wasn’t Tom Brady going back to Foxborough.
Carolina is barely running on the fumes of the Matt Rhule era. They regularly had to block Garrett with a rookie left tackle. They have a league-average offensive line at best. It’s fair to say that some power players around the NFL did not expect the current coaching staff to even be toeing the sideline this year.
Mayfield didn’t come here because he wanted to. He didn’t hold a press conference announcing that the clearly superior Panthers roster supported by their more intelligent and handsome fan base were more appealing to him. He crawled onto shore after a complete shipwreck. He was essentially fired by his employer who found a more suitable replacement and, after they did so, he went dark on social media for weeks until he could find a new roster.
Listen, there are plenty of people in the NFL who deserve our sympathy more than Mayfield. As messed up as his departure was, this is the kind of knife turn that’s commonplace in the NFL; we can understand the lay fan who rolls their eyes at this as a needless sob story. But he is an interesting test case, in a sports sense, on how quickly we can tribalize once a person changes jersey colors (and remember, Mayfield didn’t even ask for the change!)
Mayfield is never going to be a more complete player than Watson. He probably won’t win as many games. Not a great deal of that is his fault, just like the hype surrounding Sunday’s game wasn’t something Mayfield orchestrated himself. Mayfield can be O.K. in Carolina and Browns fans can be O.K. with that. What’s wrong with giving that a shot?
