Todd Bowles’ postgame explanation after Baker Mayfield’s Week 2 outing sounded a lot like the same old story Browns fans know by heart.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback put together another uneven performance, and Bowles pointed to the scramble-heavy nature of the offense when asked about the holding penalties that hurt the Bucs, including one on the final drive. But even with those flags in the mix, the head coach put the focus on Mayfield.
“Two of them for sure on third down, there is a lot of scrambling going on,” Bowles said. “Then after that it is kind of a crap shoot and you have to have kind of a feel for when to let go and when that guy is tugging back going back the other way.
So that made it kind of tough. ... [Mayfield's] been scrambling for a while, and the guys have gotten used to it.
But we just can’t have the penalties.”
For Cleveland fans, that kind of comment hits a familiar nerve. Mayfield has always been the quarterback who can look sharp one series and completely off the rails the next, sometimes even within the same drive.
The Browns know the roller coaster. They lived it.
That’s what makes the Bucs’ three-year, $165 million commitment to him before the season such a loaded decision, especially after he was outplayed by Deshaun Watson. Mayfield led an erratic Tampa Bay offense in Week 2, and the performance only sharpened the debate around whether the Browns were right to move on.
The answer, at least from a Cleveland perspective, is complicated. The Browns absolutely mishandled the replacement.
Watson’s arrival has aged badly, and that part of the decision deserves all the criticism it gets. But that doesn’t automatically mean Mayfield would have been the answer, either.
If anything, leaving Cleveland may have been the best thing that could have happened to him. Once he was gone, the blame shifted heavily onto the Browns’ dysfunction, and Mayfield got the benefit of the doubt in a way he rarely did in Berea.
And to be fair, the Browns didn’t exactly handle his exit cleanly. He had earned more than he got after dealing with a revolving door of offensive coordinators and helping deliver the franchise’s first playoff win in decades.
Still, the revisionist version of Mayfield leaves out plenty. It pretends the fan base, the media and even the locker room never wore thin on his antics and larger-than-life persona. It also ignores how often he and Kevin Stefanski were not on the same page.
That’s the part Browns fans remember when they hear comments like Bowles’. The uniform changed.
The setting changed. The storyline around him changed.
But the quarterback himself? From Cleveland’s point of view, not nearly as much as people like to say.
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