Matt Starkey/Cleveland Browns

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

This is the prevailing wisdom emanating from those dissecting the effect of the failures and subsequent trades of Jared Goff and Carson Wentz, National Football League quarterbacks who had been thought to be their franchises’ keys to the throne room. Until suddenly, they weren’t. Worse, their teams, Goff’s Rams and Wentz’s Eagles, had only recently thrown open the doors to their vaults and told the boys to dig in.

Goff and Wentz must have smiled, called the Brink’s Company for a ride, and giggled all the way to their investment bankers. Goff, QB1 in the 2016 NFL draft, received a four-year contract extension of $134 million, and Wentz, QB2 in the same draft, $128 million. Then, by way of a thank-you to their teams, they turned into Pop Warner QBs.

In 2020, they became turnover machines. Ugly. Embarrassing, really.

But not to worry. They still had their arms, their money, and other teams that believe they can help them regain the luster they had when their former teams went to the Super Bowl. (Goff took the Rams one victory shy of the championship in his third season, and Wentz’s Eagles won the Lombardi Trophy but the pedestrian Nick Foles had to finish the job after Wentz suffered a knee injury during the regular season.)

To get the hapless Detroit Lions to send them Matthew Stafford in exchange, the Rams (gladly) gave up Goff and some juicy No. 1 draft possibilities, and swallowed hard and choked down a ton of crow that is called dead money in the NFL, because that is what it makes team owners and their alleged management wish they were—dead. The Eagles found that the Colts, for a lesser price, would take Wentz off their hands and return him to the warm embrace of Frank Reich, offensive coordinator in Philadelphia when Wentz was healthy and looked like a true prize right out of nowhere North Dakota State.

These shocking reversals, which are becoming increasingly common among NFL quarterbacks, are of particular interest in Northeast Ohio. The Browns, newly minted playoff team with the glow of better days in their headlights, find themselves in the maelstrom of a QB decision not unlike the one the Eagles and Rams thought they had successfully negotiated and put behind them. Instead, they put the QBs behind them.

Everyone with a computer and an opinion is weighing in on whether the Browns should, at a minimum, pick up quarterback Baker Mayfield’s fifth-year option, which will tie him to the team through the 2022 season (a loud consensual YES). Or, exercise the option as a first step to a long-term, mega-million-dollar contract extension not unlike those given Goff and Wentz and now regretted by the dunderheads who overestimated the quarterbacks they should have known even better than when they first chose them. Or, play it cautious, and make Mayfield prove himself through another season, given that he deteriorated in year two before again ascending under new coach Kevin Stefanski.

General Manager Andrew Berry has shown a knack for the critical thinking that can unravel the Gordian knot that is assessing and filling the position on which every NFL team is dependent for success. I’ve argued that while the term franchise quarterback is thrown around in the NFL more than the football and should be redefined—minimized at a minimum—this is no time to hide under the big desk in the Browns Berea facility.

There is another alternative, provided Mayfield will agree and the contractual legalities can be made to work. (I’m no lawyer. I studied words and what they mean.) Give Mayfield his money and give it to him now (before next season). He has earned this sign of good faith. The analytics the Browns so love and seemingly put greater faith in than the eye test of a good football man (like John Dorsey, the previous GM who chose Mayfield), won’t help here. This is about what is inside Mayfield and what drives him. The answer is not on the stat sheet. It can only be discovered by looking Mayfield right in the eye and listening to him.

Longtime Browns writer Tony Grossi, who writes for pay-to-read website The Land on Demand, talked with “a veteran of several decades of negotiation big-time NFL contracts.” This source told Grossi: “My personal metric is: will the money change this guy? Period. That’s all I want to know.” And to reinforce what a negotiator hears, check Mayfield’s history. He is driven by the need to prove wrong those who doubt him. Doubted coming out of high school, he had fewer scholarship offers than he deserved. He walked on at first Texas Tech (and became the first-ever freshman starting quarterback) and then at Oklahoma, after Tech had not shown him the respect his play warranted. All he did at Oklahoma was win championships and a Heisman Trophy.

Here and elsewhere, there were skeptics about his NFL future, but Dorsey saw Mayfield for what he is—the ultimate winner, the greater the odds the better. He plays for more than money. He plays to prove he is the best. So structure his contract that way. Don’t worry about giving him more than any other quarterback—Patrick Mahomes is the highest paid: 10 years with $141.4 million guaranteed—but give him enough that it shows respect and include points at which the contract can be upgraded if, say, Mayfield wins a Super Bowl and, in the process, claims some of the Most Valuable Player hardware that so often goes to the man with the ball in his hands. In other words, exercise prudence while paying for performance with incentives.

If Mayfield were a placard-carrying kind of guy his would say: Will work for respect. When his game fell off from his promising rookie year there were many things swirling about him—recent marriage, new coach, another new coach, and then still another. His play did not match his Progressive Insurance commercial profile. Some were ready to throw him and the chip on his shoulder into the wood chipper. But, ball of fire that he is, he roared back. He proved he not only could lead a team but also that his teammates would follow him to great lengths and heights, as they had in high school and every step along the path of his college career.

This is a quarterback that should make management afraid—very, very afraid of losing him.