Getty Image
Baker Mayfield has the entire NFL buzzing about the Cleveland Browns, which, as a lifelong fan of the team, isn’t something I’m used to. In the 20 years since the franchise returned to the league, there’s never been this much hype around the Brownies, with everyone talking playoffs and (gulp) even the Super Bowl — which has made people in the Dawg Pound just a little bit geeked.
Although some within the organization are trying to downplay all the expectations — even the team’s GM, John Dorsey — one can’t help but notice how talented the Browns roster looks on paper. Not only did the team add mercurial talent Odell Beckham Jr. this offseason, but also Kareem Hunt and Olivier Vernon, which complement the already young talent on both sides of the ball. At the center of it all? Yep, that Baker Mayfield guy.
But the success of the Browns all depends on the growth that Mayfield takes in his second season. Sure, he lit things up as a rookie — especially after Week 8 when he started working with his current head coach, Freddie Kitchens, who acted as the interim Offensive Coordinator at that point before being promoted this offseason — but what’s it going to take for the former No. 1 overall pick to really take a big leap? According to Dorsey, it’s all about reading the defense and understanding matchups.
In an in-depth interview with The Ringer, John Dorsey specifically talked about how that aspect of the game is what will lead to Baker Mayfield becoming one of the top signal-callers in the NFL, while also explaining the motivation to go out and acquire offensive weapons like OBJ and Hunt to give Mayfield plenty of toys on offense.
“When you have a quarterback like Baker Mayfield, I’ve always thought, you want to put as many pieces around him as you can in Year 2 to elevate his game because you are into that second year, and you want to see a 25 percent improvement, from my perspective,” Dorsey said. “So you put pieces around him like this.”
…
“The quarterback position is a hard position to master,” he tells me. He said the improvement he’s looking for from Mayfield looks like this: “OK, I’ve now begun to mentally master the offense. Now what I have to do in my head is, I’ve got to really hone my skills on the defense and what they are going to do to me. So it’s that broader-based thinking that you’re looking at and how much depth of thinking and [how he] understands the defense.”
The way Dorsey explains it, young quarterbacks like Mayfield process each play in fairly basic terms. Eventually, Dorsey says, the hope is to get them to the point of saying, “OK, let me read the coverage while I’m walking out to the line [of scrimmage]. Can he decipher that fast enough to alleviate the stress points and say, ‘Ah, that’s easy. I just go there because that’s my best advantage’?”
John Dorsey knows that Baker Mayfield has the talent, the charisma and competitiveness to be an absolute superstar in the league, and should be capable of guiding the Browns to great heights in the not-so-distant future. Whether that comes this season or in the next couple of years, there’s a lot of pressure on the quarterback to continue to mature and separate himself from other players at his position. By reading defenses after breaking the huddle, life will become much easier for Mayfield, and, with so many weapons to throw to, will only create more headaches for opponents.