Baker Mayfield has had previous opportunities to howl when playing Patrick Mahomes

Matt Starkey/Cleveland Browns

The last time quarterbacks Baker Mayfield and Patrick Mahomes matched throws, the atmosphere produced an interesting first-professional comparison but lacked the pyrotechnics of their 2016 Saturday night college showdown in Lubbock, Texas.

If Oklahoma’s 66-59 victory over Texas Tech was not the best college football game in history, it assuredly was the most exciting shootout ever put on by two gunslinger quarterbacks who will get together again Sunday for a National Football League playoff game between Mayfield’s Cleveland Browns and Mahomes’ Kansas City Chiefs.

My conclusion comes from nearly 75 years of football—my Mama took me to my first game when I was 9 months old—and more than a 40-year journalism career, much of it working as a sports columnist for too many newspapers to count. I watched the second of the Mayfield-Mahomes college spectacles on television. I had long since hung up my jockstrap and green eyeshade but the view was good from the West Texas plains and my brain had not yet gone to mush. The record book supports such a coda.

Mahomes and Mayfield combined for 1,279 passing yards, a college football record. They set so many school or NCAA records that the NCAA should have bronzed the record book and presented each of them a copy. The most important numbers (other than the final score which, rather than statistics, is all that really matters) went like this:

Passes—Mahomes: 22-of-88* (59.1%; 145.6 rating); Mayfield: 27-of-36 (75%; 266.3).

Passing Yards—Mahomes: 734*; Mayfield 545.

Total Yards—Mahomes: 819* (12 rushes for 85 yards); Mayfield 564 (2 rushes for 19).

TDs—Mahomes: 5; Mayfield 7*.

*School or NCAA record.

 This electric game deserved its own country ballad. Maybe one by Marty Robbins, whose El Paso made the West Texas Plains famous. Unfortunately, Robbins is deceased so perhaps Oklahoman Reba McIntire’s The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia could be altered to substitute Lubbock for Georgia. Though both songs contain violence—hey, this is country music—the only violence done the night of October 24, 2016, was to the defenses of the two teams and to what Tech fans would have liked to do to Mayfield for transferring from Lubbock to Norman and the University of Oklahoma.

When Mayfield and Mahomes first met as pros, ESPN’s Jake Trotter and other ESPN staffers did more than 20 interviews with everyone from the coaches—Bob Stoops and Lincoln Riley, who would succeed Stoops as head coach at OU, and Kliff Kingsbury, now coach of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals—to one of the drummers in the OU band that could not, as it usually did, perform “Boomer Sooner” between plays to fire up the team. “The offense scored so fast,” said drummer Creighton DeKalb, we really only got to play it after touchdowns.” Such details are a part of the Mayfield-Mahomes Legend.

These two Texans knew each other from high school. Mayfield even hosted Mahomes for Mahomes official recruiting visit before Mayfield left Texas Tech for Norman. They remain friends, bound in part by position and brilliance but also their legendary meeting. Mahomes did all he did that night in Lubbock with a sprained throwing shoulder that had to be injected with a pain-killer play. Each team had outstanding offensive players; Oklahoma simply had more, including running back Joe Mixon (Cincinnati Bengals), tight end Mark Andrews and offensive tackle Orlando Brown Jr. (Baltimore Ravens), and wide receiver DeDe Westbrook (Jacksonville Jaguars).

By the time the two met again in 2018, the advantage had shifted. It was Mayfield’s first tumultuous Browns season and only his sixth start. The team had fired Hue Jackson, inserted interim head coach Gregg Williams, and handed Mayfield a new offensive coordinator, Freddie Kitchens, who become his head coach in an even worse 2019. Mahomes, meanwhile, was on his way to NFL Most Valuable Player after a season of riding on training wheels while wearing a straitjacket, neither of which he needed, as he proved after Kansas City traded Pro Bowl quarterback Alex Smith to Washington.

Though Mayfield acquitted himself well in their first professional meeting, Mahomes beat Mayfield for the first time, 37-21, in Cleveland. Mahomes threw for three touchdowns to Mayfield’s two, one of the Mahomes’ TDs to then KC running back Kareem Hunt, who also ran for two TDs. Hunt now runs and catches for the Browns, a reunion of three men whose lives have been affected by the Midas touch of John Dorsey. Dorsey not only drafted Mahomes despite having a Pro Bowl QB but he also took a chance on Hunt, a talented Cleveland kid whose two-game suspension at Toledo for violating team rules may have made him less attractive to some NFL teams.

Dorsey, with an eye for winners (coaches excluded; sorry, Freddie), should be known as Dr. Mulligan, the football guy who gives second chances more than poor golfers feel entitled to another try on the golf course. He thinks he can help remake players with “character issues” and even histories of violence become better people as well as players. He got the chance with Hunt, whom Kansas City released after a video showed him knocking down a woman in a hotel corridor. The Chiefs had surprisingly fired Dorsey, and he got his own second chance in Cleveland until it, too, fired him. (Technically the Browns owners, Dee and Jimmy Haslam, wanted to demote Dorsey, who had made a poor choice, it turned out, in selecting Kitchens as head coach.)

So even though the NFL seems not to be rushing back to his door, Dorsey at least can watch the AFC Division Playoff on Sunday with the knowledge that while he has been exiled from both Kansas City and Cleveland, he helped to make those two franchises what they are today—defending league champion and a team with new hope.

Of course, anyone with a television, a taste for quarterbacks who can wing it, and a willingness to ignore skeptics—they doubted Mahomes would translate as well as he has in the NFL game or that No. 1-pick Mayfield had the size to stand up to his Heisman Trophy hype—could have seen how smart it was to bet on the Legends of Lubbock.