During the week that Cleveland Browns General Manager Andrew Berry and Coach Kevin Stefanski professed their love for Baker Mayfield without using the F-word, the model for the NFL quarterback that Mayfield could be took his leave. What timing!

Philip Rivers announced his retirement after 17 seasons, 16 in San Diego/Los Angeles with the Chargers and one final one in Indianapolis. Rivers represents the career path to which any great but intelligent and reasonable quarterback should aspire. He controlled what he could control. He did what he could do and his numbers are among the best ever. He could deservedly end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He has all the numbers except one. He never played in, and thus could not win, a Super Bowl.

Does that reduce Rivers to the trickle of a creek? Hardly. Perhaps that was what Berry and Stefanski were getting at when they all but did happy dances over Mayfield’s season—especially the second half of it—during their wrap-up video conferences. The great minds engaged in parsing their words may have been waiting for the F-word but saw through the reluctance of the Browns’ brain trust to tart up the proceedings. They didn’t have to say FRANCHISE quarterback to recognize one when they have him.

They could have read what Akron Beacon Journal columnist Marla Ridenhour’s manifesto concerning their quarterback. It began: “It’s time to give Baker Mayfield his due . . . and his money.” Skeptics and detractors have been less than convinced about Mayfield since former general manager John Dorsey saw what he saw in Mayfield when he was quarterbacking his way to a Heisman Trophy with the Oklahoma Sooners.

Practically everyone who has devoted his or her life to helping the rest of us poor slugs understand football reached the same conclusion that Ridenhour had, though she did it before Stefanski and Berry said what they said. She as much as told them what to say. Tony Grossi, dean of the Browns media, knew “the worst [kept] secret in town . . . that the Browns will soon have to launch talks for a new contract for Mayfield.” He immediately picked up on “one obvious hint from Berry about a timetable for a new contract” when Berry said: “It was really the same trajectory with Myles [Garrett].”

The Browns exercised in May 2020 their fifth-year option on Garrett, who got to that point a year before Mayfield because he was the first (2017) of the team’s consecutive No. 1 picks. They then signed Garrett to a five-year, $125-million extension in July. If they do not do the same with Mayfield for larger quarterback numbers, their actions will have belied their words. Like Grossi, Dan Labbe, who writes Cleveland.com,deciphered correctly what Stefanski and Berry were saying while not saying it. “We’re just going to have to pick up on some of the breadcrumbs they sprinkle,” Labbe inferred.

The biggest breadcrumb in my book and kitchen is Rivers. Since they were focused on their team and not on what is happening elsewhere on the NFL stage, Stefanski and Berry didn’t bring up Rivers for a curtain call as the model for Mayfield. Let me do that.

Whether or not Mayfield ever takes his team to the Super Bowl, he has proved he is the caliber of quarterback and leader—especially leader—who can. Teammates gravitate to him and follow him. He is a younger, shorter version of Rivers. When Kevin Acee addressed Rivers’ retirement in a story for The San Diego Union-Tribune, Acee turned to Nick Hardwick, Rivers’ center from 2004 to 2014. “I’ve never been around a better leader, a guy who cared more and a guy who gave more of himself to teammates and coaches and staff and to the game,” Hardwick told Acee. “He gave everything he had every single day. There was never a question about his effort, intensity, his care level.”

A player did not have to be on the same side of the line of scrimmage with Rivers to see and hear this. Rivers was a notorious trash talker who never swore. Opponents heard him quite well and saw him clearly for what he was without the expletives that fill the air like spittle on the fields of the NFL (a COVID-19 danger, by the way). The great future Hall of Famer J.J. Watt, Houston defensive end and humanitarian when he isn’t knocking the snot out of opponents, wrote on Twitter: “I’ll never forget lining up for a play and Phil pointing to one of our linebackers and telling him he was lined up wrong based [on] the blitz we were about to run and being 100% correct about it. haha. One of the smartest I’ve ever played against and a hell of a competitor.”

A quarterback can be smartest man on the field and the best competitor and not reach the Super Bowl. Some accuse Rivers of inconsistency in the biggest moments but for that to be accurate one must carefully measure those around Rivers. Did they do enough? When you are the quarterback it does not matter. It is always the QB’s fault. Likewise, there have been those during the Browns’ 12-6 who have incessantly asked whether or not Mayfield is or can be a franchise quarterback. If the F-word means, as I believe it should: a quarterback whose play is consistently of the quality that makes his team a winner and gives it a chance to advance in the playoffs, the answer is “yes.” Rivers was. Mayfield is. Only time and water under the bridge will reveal their rewards.

When he announced his retirement Rivers, 39, said he thought he still had the arm for the NFL but that his heart had found another home and it was time to go there. St. Michael Catholic High School in Fairhope, Alabama, hired Rivers, a Northern Alabama boy, last summer to coach its football team after his retirement. His father coached Philip in high school and now dadgummit (which is Rivers’ idea of an expletive), Philip will coach his sons, the oldest of whom, Gunner, is a seventh-grader.

He will go home, faculties intact, second of the two headliner quarterbacks swapped for each other during the 2004 draft. (Eli Manning refused to play for San Diego so the Chargers drafted him No. 1 and sent him to the New York Giants in exchange for Rivers, the Giants’ fourth choice and additional picks.) My inference concerning Rivers’ mental acuity flows from the fact Rivers can recite the names of his and wife Tiffany’s children—Halle, Caroline, Grace, Gunner, Sarah, Peter, Rebecca, Clare, and Anna—with nary a fumble. That, like his career, is something of which to be proud—Super Bowl or no Super Bowl, Pro Football Hall of Fame or no Pro Football Hall of Fame.

If Baker Mayfield can one day say the same, he will have said a mouthful.