When the Patriots eyed their first year without Tom Brady, it was not lost on Bill Belichick that whoever would replace the greatest quarterback in NFL history had to have the right kind of temperament. They needed a kind of aggressive comfort in themselves and a beautiful naivety about what it would look like to simply walk into the door Brady had just walked out of and say: “What’s up, everybody?”
Say what you will about Cam Newton, but in 2020 he was that player personified. It was something Belichick always appreciated about him, which created an ideal buffer between Brady and Mac Jones, whom the Patriots drafted the following offseason and hoped would become the franchise’s next decades-long answer at the position.
Even one of the most notoriously narrative-averse people in NFL history, whose calculated decisions were always about business, could recognize the crushing, black-hole type weight that would have been placed on a rookie quarterback had the Patriots decided to go that route in 2020. Similarly, Belichick realized what it would look like to have Newton hanging around once Jones was on campus, so he released the former league MVP before the ’21 campaign.
This is a long way of saying that perhaps that knowledge was passed on. Jason Licht, the Buccaneers’ general manager and former Patriots’ director of pro personnel, signed Baker Mayfield on Wednesday to help fill the void left behind by Brady. And while I’m not comparing Newton to Mayfield, I’m acknowledging that Mayfield has been left no choice throughout his career but to become incredibly comfortable with the idea of being Baker Mayfield. Maybe it is part of the reason he’s here, battling for another chance to reclaim a long-term starting role. But maybe it’s also the reason he’s here, and not cast away as some XFL-worthy curiosity.
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It is hard to argue that being Mayfield is easy. He has chosen this persona to don, which led him to a Heisman Trophy, the No. 1 draft pick and a spot in Cleveland, where the Browns won their first playoff game since the Cold War. He then had to maintain that brashness when he was exiled to the football outpost that was Carolina in 2022 (where he’d play a season opener against the Browns). He had to endure a benching and grab on to the lifeline that was Sean McVay and the Rams, who facilitated one of the most incredible moments of Mayfield’s career: a victory over a professional football team on roughly 24 hours’ notice, with about as much knowledge of the playbook as someone who tried to hand copy it from Madden 22.
That persistence paid off to a degree, though it perpetuates a similar theme in Mayfield’s post-Cleveland career. To continue being considered an NFL quarterback, he’ll have to keep taking jobs that other quarterbacks may have shied away from. While no one is feeling sorry for a guy who might get to throw to Mike Evans and Chris Godwin, it shouldn’t be lost on us that this scattershot offensive line helped drive the most notorious football addict in history into retirement. It shouldn’t be lost on us that a lot of the component parts of the Buccaneers’ offense that worked so well over the past two years will no longer function in the same way.
This is a house closer to disrepair than it is a candidate for a quick remodeling.
Still, there is something intriguing about it all. There is something to seeing Mayfield the way Licht must see him now: not as the future, necessarily (Mayfield’s deal is for one year), but as someone who will continue to take the body blows delivered to him season after season.
Reading back on what I’ve written about Mayfield, there is certainly an admiration there and an underlying sympathy. If someone’s greatest sin is maintaining some degree of confidence in themselves—forget whatever trash Cleveland leaked about him on the way out to legitimize the Deshaun Watson signing in their minds—we should all be so unfortunate.
There is certainly a hope that this will turn into something better than what it was for Newton, a kind of mercenary gig to displace the spotlight. We know Mayfield can do that, but it’s worth tuning in to find out if he can be even more.
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