It’s the middle of January, the Cleveland Browns are in the midst of a coaching search after winning eight games in two years and they’re still on the hunt for a franchise quarterback.
Now seems like the perfect time to talk about Baker Mayfield.
Just as the franchise was trying to put the shingles back on their roof, their ex from two marriages ago just drove through the front window again. Sure, Baker Mayfield is in Tampa and Kevin Stefanski is in Atlanta, but the roots of their relationship were grown in Cleveland soil. After months (years?) of talking about how much growing up he needed to do after leaving Cleveland, Mayfield picked up the crowbar this week, inserted himself into a conversation he wasn’t invited into and went Full Baker on social media.
Failed is quite the reach pal. Still waiting on a text/call from him after I got shipped off like a piece of garbage. Can’t wait to see you twice a year, Coach. https://t.co/jUUsYkvlOC
— Baker Mayfield (@bakermayfield) January 20, 2026
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The Deshaun Watson trade has been catastrophic for the Browns. Counting the lost seasons starting in 2022 when they were depending on him to be something he wasn’t, it will take the franchise the better part of a decade to dig out of the rubble of that deal.
When they initially made the trade in March 2022, I wrote from the NFL owners meetings that this would be the defining moment of the Haslam family ownership. Watson would either absolve them of 10 years of mistakes or serve as their tombstone as NFL owners. We have that answer now.
But the Browns’ original assessment of Mayfield was spot on: wildly immature and a good-but-not-great quarterback. They believed they had a team ready to compete in the AFC everywhere but at the most important position. Mayfield’s end-of-game numbers, even when he was healthy, were horrific. Unbeknownst at the time, he was in a family dispute that culminated with him suing his father years later.
There was the shoulder injury that derailed the ’21 season. There was the Odell Beckham Jr. saga. His polarizing attitude divided the locker room. There was a lot there.
For all of Watson’s baggage, on the field, it looked like a rare opportunity to upgrade the position. I never got the sense the Browns thought Mayfield was a bad quarterback. They just couldn’t trust him, and they thought Watson presented a chance to do better.
The trade exploded all over the Browns, but I’ve written for years that I understood why they did what they did. They felt stuck with Mayfield — this wasn’t the front office or head coach that drafted him — they didn’t trust him enough to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in him, and they were desperate.
The part I never fully understood was whether the Browns made Mayfield toxic or whether he was already that way and his environment just brought it to the surface. The more removed we get from the situation, I tend to believe it was more the latter, and this week is the proof. Mayfield will never change. This is who he is.
The Browns certainly did not set Mayfield up for success early in his career. He had three head coaches and three offensive coordinators in his first three years in the league.
But Mayfield has a long history of distorting reality to fulfill whatever narrative he needs to motivate himself, and he’s doing it again. If Mayfield wants to pout over how he was treated on his way out the door, he needs to recognize his own role in it. He stopped taking calls from Browns personnel — including owner Jimmy Haslam. He went radio silent on the organization after the ’21 season before they began courting Watson.
“If your wife stopped talking to you for weeks,” one Mayfield confidant told me years ago. “Eventually you’re going to ask for a divorce.”
So Mayfield stopped communicating with the organization and asked for a trade after the Watson pursuit leaked. And now he wants to cry victim that he was treated like garbage?
He did the same thing in Carolina when he asked for his release and then blamed interim coach Steve Wilks for cutting him.
He feuded publicly with Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech. He bashed Gary Patterson for not offering him a scholarship at TCU. He ripped Hue Jackson. Then it was Wilks. Now it’s Stefanski.
Is there any coach Mayfield actually liked? Lincoln Riley? Anyone else? Who is the real problem here?
Mayfield lives in a vicious cycle of underachieving, creating a new enemy to motivate himself, playing well briefly and pounding his chest about it, then underachieving again. He is allergic to his own success.
Now the Buccaneers are facing the same hard questions Browns personnel once had to answer. Mayfield is entering the final year of his deal in Tampa. He has been a success for the Bucs, but is he worth a top-scale quarterback contract? If not, then what?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That goes for Baker Mayfield, too.