Nick Chubb and the Browns’ run game found a rhythm that eluded Baker Mayfield
David Dermer/Cleveland Browns
If the Cleveland Browns wish to turn back their offense a century—and it looks as if they do—the quarterback they need is deader than Baker Mayfield’s arm looked against the Minnesota Vikings. Fritz Pollard, who quarterbacked the Akron Pros to the first National Football League championship in 1920 and himself into the Pro Football Hall of Fame posthumously in 2005, more resembled Kevin Stefanski’s ideal.
The problem is Fritz Pollard died in 1986.
When Pollard played quarterback—he was really a running back, even when he played QB—he threw a pumpkin of a football compared with today’s more aerodynamic ellipse. Come to think of it Mayfield looked as if he, too, were throwing pumpkins. Many of them went splat, right along with what had been one of the more highly accurate completion percentages (70 percent-plus) in the NFL this season.
And Mayfield knew it.
“I pride myself on being extremely accurate,” he told the media, “and today, I don’t know what the hell that was.”
He looked more like Wild Thing, the bespectacled fictional Cleveland pitcher Ricky Vaughn whom Charlie Sheen portrayed in the 1989 movie Major League.
At the University of Oklahoma, where Mayfield won the Heisman Trophy, his completion percentage was 69.8 (808 of 1157) during his three seasons (2015-2017).
It is difficult to describe and was equally difficult to have watched what Mayfield accurately termed a “piss-poor performance.” The rebuilt and reinforced defense saved Mayfield and his team from the consequences of his sorry day and allowed the 3-1 Browns to beat the Vikings, 14-7. The Vikings are the team with which Stefansky spent the entirety of this 14-year NFL career before becoming Browns head coach in 2020. Especially during the latter Viking years working with Mike Zimmer, whose background was that of a defensive coordinator, Stefanski learned to appreciate the running game.
According to ESPN statistics the Browns lead the NFL in rushing attempts after four games with 140 and in rushing yards with 708 and average per game (177 yards). The Browns run so often and so well that the quarterback and the passing game can look like an afterthought. Great runners like Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt need carries to find their rhythm with an offensive line that would sooner maul open holes as aggressors than set up, fall back, and sometimes even pull out to protect their passer; quarterbacks require the same, if not more, attention for parts and minds to mesh.
Mayfield recognized the problem, and he insisted that it was not his left, non-throwing arm connected to the shoulder he injured against Houston two weeks prior trying to make a tackle following an interception. Though he might have played as if he were the One-Armed Man in the old television series The Fugitive—actually, Mayfield threw more like a No-Armed Man—he pinned his poor play on two failures: one, a failure to communicate with his receivers, especially Odell Beckham Jr., and two, a failure to find his rhythm. He accepted full responsibility for the first and indirectly acknowledged his part in the second while taking care not to throw shade on Stefanski, who deserves it.
“There’s a lot of easy throws there that I think missed and situationally, you get into running the ball, and you don’t have a couple of throws for a while, you just get out of rhythm,” he explained. He did not add that it is Stefanski and offensive coordinator Alex Van Pelt who collaborate on those decisions, with Stefanski calling the plays.
He completed only 15-of-33 throws for 155 yards and a passer rating of 59.5 after having ratings of 97.5, 105, and 97 in the previous three games. His 45.45 completion percentage was his lowest under Stefanski and second lowest in his three-plus seasons. A 36.36 at San Francisco in his regressive year of 2019 was the nadir.
The worst of it—since a win is a win is a win—may be that after establishing a connection with Beckham a week ago in OBJ’s first game since his 2020 ACL injury that ended his season in October, Mayfield opened the door to more doubts about whether he and Beckham really have the chemistry necessary between QB1 and WR1.
When he could have put a dagger in the Vikings and an exclamation point on a victory over a good defensive team with a throw down the right sideline to an open Beckham with 1:01 left in the game, Mayfield missed. Again. He targeted OBJ seven times and completed just two for 27 yards. On the final one, according to Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com, Beckham looked for the ball inside but Mayfield threw outside and short. “I didn’t communicate well enough about the type of ball that I’m trying to throw to him,” Mayfield said he told Beckham. “We said early on in the year that things are better left said than not being said.”
There is a broader, deeper issue here that went unaddressed. Winning big in the NFL requires a sharp and reliable passing attack as well as a strong running game. Each has a rhythm but, as any offensive lineman will happily explain, they are not the same rhythms. Mayfield, Stefanski, and Van Pelt need first to communicate among themselves about the possibility that the Browns’ reliance on the running they are best at is shortchanging the development of Mayfield and the passing game. My long-ago football days occurred in an almost all-run formation—the single wing—now all but extinct. We threw the ball about as often as a kiss turns a frog into Prince Charming. If the Browns do not use it, they’ll do more than lose the passing game.
Stefanski, who keeps an even on his own keel quite well, needs to place greater emphasis on the part of his team’s game that remains stunted from underutilization and miscommunication. If the Browns, who have all the pieces necessary for the ultimate success, continue to pound the ball to the exclusion of improving the passing game’s rhythm, they can kiss off kissing the Vince Lombardi Trophy under the bright night lights of the Super Bowl.
NOTE: All of the enumerated Mayfield Memorandums can be found at: https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/
