CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Baker Mayfield had just the sort of outing you’d hope for Friday night in the Carolina Panthers’ final preseason game — a 21-0 win over Buffalo — throwing two touchdown passes and often looking as sharp as the tip of a spear.
And the tip of the spear is what Mayfield will need to be this year for the Panthers, who have been hamstrung by inconsistent quarterback play for each of the past four seasons. Carolina has been desperate for a player who can perform well enough to give the team a chance to win, week in and week out.
Mayfield — maybe — is that player.
It was at least worth the gamble that Carolina took in early July, acquiring Mayfield from the Cleveland Browns for a conditional fifth-round pick in 2024. It took Mayfield less than two months to win the starting job over Sam Darnold, and he looked fine Friday night, throwing two touchdown passes on the four drives in which he played.
That was the good news.
The bad news is that Carolina got ransacked by more significant injuries in a meaningless game. Darnold suffered an ankle injury late in the third quarter with 3:22 left. While throwing the ball, Darnold was plastered by Buffalo defensive tackle C.J. Brewer, who legally tackled him down from behind, with Darnold’s lower left leg caught under Brewer. Darnold looked to be in immediate pain and he was carted off the field with an ankle injury.
“Very unfortunate,” Mayfield said. Darnold wasn’t available for comment following the game, but he had crutches stacked beside his locker. Panther coach Matt Rhule said he didn’t think Darnold had broken his ankle, but likely had sprained it — a high-ankle sprain would be more serious and keep him out 4-6 weeks.
The injury impacts Darnold, of course. But it also affects Mayfield, who just lost his safety net for an undetermined period of time.
Shortly before the Darnold injury, Carolina placekicker Zane Gonzalez was also carted off the field with a groin injury, suffered while he was practicing kicking on the sideline. He joined Carolina defensive tackle Derrick Brown (oblique) and tight end Giovanni Ricci (groin) as players injured the game although Brown, at least, would have returned if the contest had meant anything.
Mayfield, meanwhile, remained unscathed.
And now, without the reliable backup Darnold was supposed to be, Mayfield’s continued good health and his emergence as a consistent starter will be even more important.
Now comes the long wait, necessitated by the NFL going from four preseason games to three a couple of seasons ago (it should have gone to two, or even zero, but that’s another story). Carolina won’t play again until Sept. 11, when Mayfield faces his old team, the Cleveland Browns, in an NFL scheduling irony that is similar to what Darnold saw last year (a home regular-season opener against his old team, the New York Jets).
Mayfield said last week that he wasn’t going to be a “robot” and pretend that the Cleveland game will be the same as any other game to him.
By the same token, he has also calmed down his rambunctious personality considerably since he got to Charlotte, steering clear of quotes that would be splashed all over social media and of on-field demonstrations.
“The thing I like about Baker right now is he plays so steady,” Panther coach Matt Rhule said. “You can’t tell after every play if it was a drop or if it was a completion.”
Mayfield was 9 for 15 for 89 yards and two touchdowns Friday while playing well into the second quarter but characterized his play as “some good, some bad.”
“Overall, a little sloppy, to be honest with you,” Mayfield said. “I feel like my feet weren’t really calm. I felt like I drifted in the pocket a little bit and created my own pressure.”
His two touchdown passes: a 2-yarder to running back D’Onta Foreman on a fourth-down play, and a 19-yard strike to wide receiver Shi Smith during a scramble drill where Mayfield cleverly improvised. Mayfield also scrambled out of trouble a couple of times and shouldered one defender to the ground. And while he didn’t hit every receiver, never made a really bad play, either.
The Smith TD was a strike Mayfield executed perfectly. The Foreman play could have been a bad one, though, as Mayfield threw the ball toward the wrong shoulder of a wide-open Foreman after a play-action had totally fooled the defense. Foreman had to turn and make a one-handed catch across his body, which he did, but still. From eight yards away, Mayfield should have hit him in both hands, and he knew it.
“If there’s a defender actually chasing him, it’s a terrible throw,” Mayfield said.
Still, Carolina would take that sort of QB performance 17 out of 17 weeks in the regular season. While going 22-43 over the past four years, Carolina has been plagued by on-and-off QB play. Part of it has been the fault of an offensive line that has rarely seemed settled since the Super Bowl season of 2015, but much of it has simply been due to having spotty play at the game’s most important position.
Mayfield, 29-30 in four seasons as a starter at Cleveland, has hardly demonstrated the tendencies of, say, an Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady. But he did get Cleveland to the playoffs in 2020 and also won a game while there, which is certainly more than Darnold can say for his career of the exact same length (they were two of the top three draft picks in the 2018 NFL draft).
But Darnold is now hurt, which leaves P.J. Walker as Mayfield’s immediate backup and the Panthers likely searching the waiver wire for another QB early next week — if not hiring someone like Cam Newton or another veteran before that.
The simplest solution to this quarterback quandary? Mayfield stays healthy and plays well. That’s the path to the playoffs. Almost everything else leads down the wrong road.
