Baker Mayfield has officially won the Carolina Panthers’ starting quarterback job. Not that it was much of a competition to begin with.
Mayfield beat out Sam Darnold, 2021’s worst non-rookie quarterback, an injured Matt Corral and XFL legend P.J. Walker for the job. Despite head coach Matt Rhule’s insistence this was an “open competition,” the position was the former No. 1 overall pick’s to lose all along. It only took 10 preseason game passes — seven from Mayfield and three from Darnold — for Rhule to come to an official decision.
“When we started this process, we were looking at three things,” Rhule said via an official release on Panthers.com. “Number one, mastery of the offense, number two, situational football excellence, and number three, moving the ball and getting guys involved. That’s been our focus all along.
“Baker has made a lot of improvement, a lot of growth in all three areas in a short amount of time.”
Even if he didn’t — even if Mayfield, acquired in July from a Cleveland Browns team that didn’t just no longer want him but also unofficially trashed him on the way out, only learned 20 percent of the offense — this was always going to be the right decision. Mayfield is flawed, but he’s shown signs of growth and sustained more … well, not excellence per se but certainly pretty-goodness over a longer period of time than anyone else in the quarterbacks room in Charlotte.
Let’s cherry-pick some numbers. Here’s the back-end of Mayfield’s first season, where he made a run at rookie of the year honors and played well enough for Cleveland to promote interim offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens to head coach months later (it went poorly).
Here he is in the final 10 games of 2020, which led to Cleveland’s first playoff win since 1994:
That momentum was shattered by the torn labrum in his non-throwing shoulder that affected his play throughout 2021 and portended his departure from Ohio. Now he’s healthy again and, while inconsistent, still the best passer on the Panthers’ roster. He’ll also have a strong complement of wideouts to push him through bad days; the combination of D.J. Moore, Robby Anderson, Terrace Marshall and old friend Rashard Higgins has the potential to be significantly better than the group he pushed to the playoffs in ’20.
Mayfield currently sits at +900 (via Tipico) to win the NFL’s 2022 Comeback Player of the Year award, behind Derrick Henry, Jameis Winston and Christian McCaffrey. Those are the exact same odds you’d get plunking cash down on Daniel Jones to win it. There’s value there, especially now that his path to the starting lineup has officially been cleared.
The Panthers played it safe with their quarterback competition. They didn’t alienate anyone, held a contest where the outcome was already 90 percent predetermined, then made the obvious choice. It’s not exciting, but it was the right thing to do. Now it’s time for Mayfield to hold him his end of the bargain and finally give Rhule an above-average QB.
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