Baker Mayfield (left) and Kyler Murray exchange jerseys when the meet as pros in 2019
cardswire.usatoday.com
The idiom goes like this: Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd. In some circumstances—a ménage à trois, for instance—three is the perfect number. Other times, even two can be a crowd. It could have been the latter in the 2016 University of Oklahoma quarterback room that Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray shared. Never seemed that way, though.
From a distance, the teammates appeared to be friends much more than foes. It has to be different Sunday at FirstEnergy Stadium when Murray and his Arizona Cardinals bring the only perfect National Football League record (5-0) to visit the 3-2 Browns. The two quarterbacks will be foes, if indirectly, and the comparisons will be inevitable.
They always have been. They are more so now.
In fact, Mayfield, it seems, might be compared unfavorably these days with a scarecrow. He has become the straw man in an orange helmet and it has been suggested—even in the friendly confines of Northeast Ohio—that he is neither wizard nor superstar quarterback, because he could not wring one last touchdown out of the Los Angeles Chargers in a 47-42 loss this past Sunday. The Plain Dealer headline on a story earlier this week asked: “Is Baker Mayfield already eclipsed? Young QBs are taking NFL by storm.” Murray is mentioned among the hotshot young guns. But not Mayfield.
It was not always that way.
They followed the same road to Norman, Oklahoma, as transfers before the NCAA magically transformed that path into something called the transfer portal, an officially sanctioned stopover on the way to finding a new football home. Mayfield, a walk-on at Texas Tech in 2013, walked on a second time at OU in 2014 and served a redshirt penance year before taking the QB job away from incumbent Trevor Knight, MVP of Oklahoma’s stunning 2014 Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama.
As the merry-go-round continued to spin, Knight, deciding he did not want to spend a second season watching Mayfield excel, transferred for his senior year (2016) to Texas A&M, the very school from which Murray had fled following his 2015 freshman season.
It gets better—and more complicated.
With Mayfield on a Heisman Trophy trajectory—fourth in 2015, third in 2016, first in 2017—Oklahoma Coach Lincoln Riley, first as offensive coordinator and then, in 2017, as head coach, declined to fiddle with a winner. So Murray waited through 2017, after his own redshirt purgatory in 2016. When he did get back onto the field he did things—often with his fast feet—that could cause a person’s eyes to become big and bug out.
That was simply preview.
One Texan-turned-Sooner followed another to the Heisman stage to accept the statuette that symbolized that, as marvelous as each of them had been in high school, they were now officially the best of college players. Of course, quarterbacks have an advantage since they touch the ball on almost every play and all eyes are on them. Each was the No. 1 choice in the NFL draft choice, Mayfield in 2018, Murray in 2019.
And here we are.
Though both are short compared with most NFL quarterbacks—Mayfield 6-1, Murray 5-10—they are throwers rather than latter-day Fran Tarkentons, who would have as soon scrambled as not. Neither are they to be confused with Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, a runner of a quarterback who has, through diligence, become a comparatively competent passer. Murray, who did rush 133 times in 2020 for 819 yards, has been given fewer designated running plays this season and is taking flight less often (30 for 110 yards).
He has the advantage of being coached by Kliff Kingsbury, the former Texas Tech University coach, who has adapted college’s popular spread offense to the NFL and is comfortable giving the shorter quarterback whom he tried to recruit out of high school almost all his snaps in the shotgun formation. This offers Murray better vision, and he can more easily throw over the monsters in middle of the field and see them coming.
In their 2019 first meeting in Glendale, Arizona, Murray’s rookie season, he prevailed, 38-24, with greater accuracy (19-of-25 for 219 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT) and a better running game, including his own 56 yards on 8 carries, one of them for 35 yards. Mayfield’s 2019 stats were gaudier—30-of-43 for 247 yards, 2 TDs, 1 INT)—but did not produce the desired result. Mayfield’s 2019, playing for his fourth coach in three seasons, became a regression. That changed in the latter half of 2020, under Kevin Stefanski.
Even when he has had bad games, such as a shaky 14-7 victory over Minnesota, Mayfield has remained an out-front leader, boisterous, aggressive, and taking his lumps and even administering them to himself when deserved. Murray, by contrast, is quieter and more reserved, but teams respond to winners and Murray has proved he is one and he also has the help of one of the better groups of receivers in the league (DeAndre Hopkins, A.J Green, Christian Kirk, and 5-7 but 4.32-fast rookie Rondale Moore).
As Mayfield and Murray, the former teammates go at each other on another professional judgment day, their old quarterback room may have become as uncomfortable as it could have been when they shared it. QB Spencer Rattler, the preseason Heisman favorite, was benched last week when he struggled with Texas. Freshman Caleb Williams played like the 5-star, best-QB-recruit-in-the-country that he was supposed to be and brought OU from 21 points down to defeat archrival Texas, 55-48. This left Riley to sort out how to move forward with two quarterbacks and one ball.
It had seemed so well choreographed: Rattler follows in the footsteps of Murray and Mayfield, wins the Heisman, and exits for the NFL, leaving OU in Williams’s hands. Transition isn’t as easy as Mayfield and Murray made it look. Even they know that now.
NOTE: All of the enumerated Mayfield Memorandums can be found at: https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/
