Baker Mayfield has a Chip on his shoulder
Baker Mayfield has had a chip on his shoulder his entire football career. It all started in High School as he was never highly recruited to play college football. He started his college football career at Texas Tech, where he became the first walk-on/true freshman to start at quarterback in the first game of the season.
However, during the season Mayfield played with a knee injury that negatively affected his play. This resulted in him losing his starting spot to another true freshman, Davis Webb.
The next year Mayfield was denied a scholarship from Texas Tech and decided to transfer to the University of Oklahoma where he became a walk-on as well. Due to NCAA rules by transferring Mayfield lost a full year of eligibility and would not be able to start his career with Oklahoma until 2015.
At the start of the 2015 season, Mayfield was named starting quarterback over Trevor Knight. That season Mayfield was able to finish fourth in Heisman voting totaling over 3,700 yards, 36 touchdowns, and 7 interceptions. Mayfield and Oklahoma fell short of a National Championship after losing to Clemson 37-17 in the College Football Playoff.
In the 2016 season, Mayfield gained a lot of traction finishing third in Heisman voting. It was not until the 2017 season that Mayfield was awarded the Heisman Trophy his senior year as they lost in the semi-final of the college football playoff to the University of Georgia.
Baker and the Browns
Baker Mayfield went on to become the first overall pick in the 2018 NFL draft being selected by the Cleveland Browns. Before this, the Browns had struggled tremendously being the worst team in the NFL for years. They struggled to draft the right quarterback every year and managed to go through a plethora of quarterbacks over 15 years.
They were confident in bringing in Baker Mayfield as they would look to go to the playoffs for the first time since 2002. Baker had a lot of pressure to turn the Browns around and was able to bring Cleveland to their first playoff in 18 years, where they lost in the Divisional round to the Kansas City Chiefs.
In that season Baker led the Browns to an 11-5 record throwing for over 3,500 yards, 26 touchdowns, and 8 interceptions on a quarterback rating of 95.9. The future was looking bright for Mayfield and the Browns as the team exercised his fifth-year contract which paid the quarterback almost 19 million dollars for the 2021 season.
After playing with a partially torn Labrum for parts of the season, Mayfield and the Browns missed the playoffs. This offseason Cleveland decided to trade for Quarterback Deshaun Watson who has faced a lot of problems off the field by not playing the entire 2021 season.
The Browns as of Wednesday, July 6th, traded Baker for a fifth-round pick, which must hurt the young quarterback as he gave Cleveland his all. The big question is will Baker be able to bounce back as he has gained another chip on his shoulder.
