Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield took to social media Tuesday to say he never heard from coach Kevin Stefanski after the Cleveland Browns traded him to the Carolina Panthers in 2022.
Now the two are in the NFC South Division after the Atlanta Falcons hired Stefanski as their next head coach on Saturday.
“Still waiting on a text/call from him after I got shipped off like a piece of garbage,” Mayfield posted. “Can’t wait to see you twice a year, Coach.”
The Browns drafted Mayfield, a Heisman Trophy winner at Oklahoma, with the No. 1 pick of the 2018 NFL draft. He played four seasons in Cleveland, passing for 3,725 yards in his first season with 27 touchdown passes, with the latter more than any rookie had thrown in a single season to that point. In Stefanski’s first season as Cleveland’s head coach in 2020, Mayfield led the Browns to the playoffs for the first time in 17 years and their first postseason victory in 26 seasons.
However, Mayfield also struggled with consistency — he threw 22 touchdowns passes and 21 interceptions in 2019 — and wasn’t afraid to confront critics of his play.
After being traded to the Panthers, Mayfield found his career at a crossroads. He revived it in Tampa Bay, leading the Bucs to the playoffs in 2023 and 2024 before a late-season collapse kept them out of this year’s postseason as the Panthers won the NFC South when the Falcons beat the New Orleans Saints on the final day of the regular season.
Stefanski coached the Browns for six years before he was fired after this season. The Falcons hired him less than two weeks later as the replacement to Raheem Morris, whose two-year tenure as Atlanta’s head coach produced back-to-back 8-9 records and pushed the franchise’s run of consecutive losing seasons to eight, all of them without a playoff berth.
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