Baker Mayfield Has Golden Opportunity to Seize LeBron Power Vacuum in Cleveland

LeBron James is gone. Having fulfilled his promise of a championship to the voracious Cleveland fans, he left a lot more gracefully this time around. He’ll still be around the block with his charity work in Akron, but Baker Mayfield is arriving at the absolute perfect time to usurp the mantle of the city’s Sports Hero.

Everyone has an opinion, but nobody knows for sure whether Baker Mayfield will justify being the first overall pick in a draft that featured a lot of other quarterback talent in Sam Darnold and Josh Rosen, as well as Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson. But, if Mayfield does fulfill John Dorsey’s evaluation, it’s undeniable that he will be eternally beloved in that city.

Mayfield has a very particular brand of swagger. Johnny Manziel gets tossed around as a comparison often for obvious reasons: size, overflowing confidence, the regrettable police chase video, igniting electricity in their college stadiums, and both getting picked by the Browns. However, the arrest video notwithstanding, Mayfield is more in control of his behavior than Manziel was at the corresponding time period. While he did a good bit of freelancing at Oklahoma, he’s better suited to perform within the confines of a standard offense than Manziel was entering the league.

Mayfield’s brashness makes him an easy target for opinionists. Much to their delight, he meticulously pays attention to it and pushes back. Have we ever seen an active pro quarterback spar with Skip Bayless and Colin Cowherd like he did recently?

If you polled the country’s population of professional football coaches, it’s a virtual certainty that nearly all of them would prefer a rookie quarterback who’s not yet guaranteed the starting job say very little at this stage, doing  everything to avoid the spotlight and definitely not aggressively amplify it.

But what if that brashness galvanizes the Browns, who infamously have had 28 starting quarterbacks since 1999 (since 2011: Colt McCoy, Seneca Wallace, Brandon Weeden, Thad Lewis, Jason Campbell, Brian Hoyer, Johnny Manziel, Connor Shaw, Josh McCown, Austin Davis, RG3, Cody Kessler, DeShone Kizer, Kevin Hogan)?

It’s not like Mayfield needs to be the GOAT to be a dramatic improvement over what Browns fans have had, either. They’re 4-44 over the past three years. If they are on the outskirts of the playoff picture in Week 12 and finish a feisty 7-9, that would be a promising enough start to breed some hope for the future. Mayfield has some weapons in Josh Gordon (obligatory caveat that he stays out of trouble between now and the season) and Jarvis Landry.

The NFL turns over pretty fast and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Browns could at least be frisky. Mayfield has a tremendous opportunity to win the hearts and minds of Cleveland fans. Whether he does or doesn’t, at least it’ll be very interesting every step of the way.