At the conclusion of an historic half of football during which the Cleveland Browns rendered asunder the Tennessee Titans, a team that had demolished them a season earlier on its way to the National Football League’s AFC Championship Game, there remained one humongous question:
What now?
This was foreign territory, a strange and wondrous land. The Browns, for all their ambition and desire and preparation to fulfill it, had never reached this lofty altitude. With a blindingly beautiful first half, they were blowing out, 38-7, a quality, playoff-tested opponent on the road. How were they to behave during the second half.
This wasn’t in the coach’s manual, which it seemed Kevin Stefanski already had discarded to the surprise of the Titans. They and everyone who knew a pigskin from a lamb chop had expected this showdown between 8-3 playoff contenders had expected slam-bam running games from the two best running teams in the league.
So what had happened? Instead of relying on running backs Nick Chubb (18 carries for 80 yards) and Kareem Hunt (14 for 33), with quarterback Baker Mayfield the ornamental game manager, Stefanski turned his offense into a three-ring aerial circus.
And what a show it was.
Mayfield hit 20-of-25 first-half passes to eight different receivers for 290 yards and four touchdowns. The only other old Browns quarterback to throw for four TDs in a first half happens to have been Otto Graham, best in the team’s storied history. Now, the Hall of Famer has the company of the best QB in the hapless history of the new Browns.
Instead of telling us how much he trusts Mayfield, something too few others have been willing to do, Stefanski showed us. With words a person learns—though it is not always true—that it is better to show than to tell. Showing requires action words. Mayfield showed everyone, with long TD passes (75 yards to rookie Donovan Peoples-Jones, single receiver in a three-tight end formation which usually means run) and short ones (1 yard to reserve Kendall Lamm on a tackle-eligible play). He had been good in a similar four-TD second half comeback at Cincinnati, but since it occurred against a losing team—like seven of the Browns’ first eight victories—some applied an asterisk.
Not this time. This drew attention far and wide.
Mayfield, who has gone five consecutive games (156 passes) without an interception, had the week’s best overall statistical line—25-of-33 (76%), 334 yards, 4 TDs, 0 INT, 147 QB rating—among NFL quarterbacks. He did fumble late in the game. That allowed the Titans to score a last touchdown and make the final 41-35 score unrepresentative.
The defense, in fact, not only played better than the score would indicate but also set the tone for the tune that Mayfield carried throughout the first half. When Sheldon Richardson stopped NFL leading-rusher Derrick Henry cold, inches shy of a first down on fourth-and-one in Tennessee’s first series, his coach Mike Vrabel, former Walsh Jesuit High School, Ohio State, and New England Patriots star, could not believe it. He challenged the measurement, only to have it verified by review, losing a time out.
The defense forced Tennessee into three turnovers. Vrabel probably couldn’t believe that either. The Titans had committed only five in their previous 11 games. They are a careful team that wasn’t careful enough and a running team that couldn’t run. Even Henry fumbled, something he does only once in a blue moon. He gained only 60 yards, partially because Ryan Tannehill had to throw and throw some more with such a large deficit to overcome. Just as the Titans could not stop Mayfield when he could be aggressive neither could the Browns staunch the flow of points Tannehill generated.
“It’s tricky when you get up by that much . . .,” Mayfield told the media afterward. “You want to run the ball to take the clock away, to give them [fewer] opportunities. But at the same time, you don’t want to go away from what is working.” That was Baker himself.
Stefanski never quite found the balance in this new land of the big lead. Where he had been tricky and aggressive in his first-half play calls—a pass from Jarvis Landry to Mayfield, who looked like a padded ballet dancer making the catch, a demonstration to Vrabel of how to execute the tackle-eligible pass play that Tennessee muffed. The second-half offense more closely resembled a bull shorn of its horns. People noticed.
“There are plenty of nits to pick in a performance that produced just 3 points in the second half,” Benjamin Hoffman of The New York Times concluded, “but the truth is that Mayfield did so much in the first half . . . that nothing in the second half ultimately mattered.”
It is a strange statement when applied to the Browns, a team that has been to the playoffs only once—and lost, of course—since resurrected by the NFL in 1999. “They have been synonymous with dysfunction and directionlessness and infighting, often at the same time,” Judy Battista, NFL.com columnist wrote. “It’s not so much that the Browns are actively disrespected as that . . . nobody even puts the Browns and respect in the same thought. That will change now, and fast.”
This was a team and individual statement. Mayfield missed receivers in the end zone in the previous two games. He promised to be better. And he was. “Baker Mayfield was legit in a big game,” concluded Dominic Bonvissuto on Peter King’s Football Morning in America on NBC Sports. “I’ve been negative on Mayfield, particularly his inaccuracy downfield. He was marvelous on those deep balls Sunday in building a huge lead.”
It will not be the last time. This was Oklahoma-Heisman-winner Baker Mayfield, who not only longs to be trusted but also to justify that trust. Now if only he and the Browns can learn to live happily ever in this strange new land that comes with a big first-half lead.
