Mayfield may lead Browns out of the wilderness
Cleveland, Ohio, is the place where quarterbacking careers go to perish and NFL opponents go to win.
Or at least it was.
The Cleveland Browns were reborn Thursday night. Their long wait for a victory ended. Their even longer wait for a franchise quarterback to arrive quite possibly came to a simultaneous conclusion. Baker Mayfield made a dazzling NFL debut and the Browns rallied from a twotouchdown deficit to beat the New York Jets, 21-17, for their first win since Dec. 24, 2016.
“I feel good,” Mayfield said during a postgame appearance on NFL Network. “We finally put the pieces together a little bit . . . That’s the thing I’m most proud of is we put it together for the fans at home.”
The Browns are winners again. They have taken huge strides toward respectability after going 1-31 over the previous two seasons, including 0-16 last season. They are, in short, no longer the Browns, at least not the Browns as everyone has come to know them in recent years.
Mayfield, the Heisman Trophy winner, is from Austin, Texas. He was drafted by the Browns in April. He was superb after taking over late in the first half for starter Tyrod Taylor, who struggled mightily and then exited the game with a head injury. Mayfield completed 17 of 23 passes for 201 yards and thoroughly outplayed fellow prized rookie quarterback Sam Darnold of the Jets.
“That’s never the way you want to get out on the field, not when you see one of your captains go down,” Mayfield, 23, said. “That’s a guy I have tremendous respect for. He’s helped me out tremendously throughout this process. That’s never the way I want to go out there. But at the same time, I was never thinking about all the quarterbacks we’ve had play in the past here. I’ve always told myself I’m different. And the past is the past. You’ve got to hit the reset button. You’ve got to take the next step forward.”
It was a night that brought the hope of better times ahead for a franchise that has been as downtrodden as they come.
“I think the kid’s just a winner,” Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman said on the NFL Network broadcast of the game.
Aikman’s former Dallas Cowboys teammate, Hall of Fame wide receiver Michael Irvin, said on the postgame set of the league’s TV network: “They picked the right guy when they picked Baker Mayfield.”
It was not an obvious choice by John Dorsey, the new general manager who has overseen the reconstruction of the Browns’ roster. Many talent evaluators believed that Darnold would be the first quarterback selected. But Dorsey went with Mayfield, who was expected to spend much or all of this season sitting on the bench and waiting for his turn because Dorsey had traded for Taylor to be the team’s starter.
Mayfield is an accurate passer and a commanding leader. He was a dominant university player at Oklahoma. But he had to spend the pre-draft process convincing teams that he could be trusted and that he wasn’t too brash. He had to convince the Browns that he wouldn’t be the next coming of Johnny Manziel, the would-be franchise saviour who became just another member of the lengthy list of failed Browns quarterbacks.
Mayfield is no Manziel, if his debut was any indication. He delivered passes on time and on target. He energized the fans and his team. He inherited a 14-0 deficit and immediately threw a pair of darts for completions.
The Browns, that rapidly, had been transformed.
Two field goals by new kicker Greg Joseph, sandwiched around halftime, narrowed the deficit to 14-6, then the Browns got even in the final minute of the third quarter.
Mayfield delivered a laser of a pass to wide receiver Jarvis Landry, running up the seam on the right side of the field, for a 29yard gain to set up tailback Carlos Hyde’s touchdown run. The Browns managed a successful two-point conversion when Mayfield caught a trick-play pass by Landry, in a reprise of the “Philly Special” pulled off by the Eagles in the Super Bowl.
The Jets retook the lead with a field goal. But Mayfield led the Browns to a go-ahead touchdown by Hyde with only about two minutes remaining, and the Browns held on with two late interceptions of Darnold.
The Browns went 635 days between wins. They’d gone 0-18-1 since their previous victory. They’d opened the season by tying the Pittsburgh Steelers, then they’d suffered a near-miss loss at New Orleans.
They needed a breakthrough. They released kicker Zane Gonzalez after his misadventures in the season’s first two games. They traded talented but troubled wide receiver Josh Gordon to New England on Monday.
On Thursday, Mayfield gave the entire organization and the entire city a new start.
“I didn’t do this by myself, and I’m not gonna handle it that way,” Mayfield said. “I had a lot of guys play well around me . . . . We put the pieces together . . . . Now we’ve just got to build on it.”