A Buccaneers assistant coach said this week that the Cleveland Browns Baker Mayfield trade was a mistake, and the man who said it is not some talk show voice reaching for heat. It is Ken Zampese, who coached Mayfield's position in Cleveland in 2018, watched the whole rookie year up close, and now stands on the Tampa sideline four days before the Browns walk into his stadium.
That is what gives it teeth. Anybody can say Cleveland whiffed. Not many people were in the quarterback room when it started.
Why is Ken Zampese saying the Browns messed up with Baker Mayfield
Zampese is a coaching lifer from a coaching family. His father Ernie was one of the architects of the Air Coryell passing game, an offensive coordinator for the Rams and the Cowboys back when that offense was rewriting what a passing attack could look like. Ken ran the Bengals offense as their coordinator before landing in Cleveland, and he was the Browns' quarterbacks coach the year they took Mayfield first overall.
So when he says Cleveland messed up, he is not grading a highlight reel. He is grading a player he saw every day at 7 a.m.
There is a wrinkle here too, and it is the fun kind. Coaches say this stuff about their old teams all the time. They rarely say it in the same week that old team is on the schedule. Zampese did.
What happened with Baker Mayfield and the Browns
The short version, and Cleveland fans know every beat of it by heart:
| Year | The move |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Browns draft Mayfield No. 1 overall |
| 2020 | Mayfield leads Cleveland to a playoff win in Pittsburgh |
| 2022 | Traded to Carolina for a conditional Day 3 pick after the Browns acquire Deshaun Watson |
| 2022 | Waived by Carolina, claimed by the Rams |
| 2023 | Signs with Tampa Bay |
The 2020 run is the part that still stings. That January the Browns went into Pittsburgh and won a playoff game for the first time since the 1994 season, a drought that had swallowed an entire generation of Cleveland football. Mayfield was the quarterback. Two years later he was a conditional draft pick.
checked the almanac: mayfield's first career win came on thursday, september 20, 2018, when he came off the bench against the jets and snapped a browns winless run that had stretched across nearly two full seasons. cleveland plays in tampa on september 20 this year. eight years to the day.
In 2018 he also threw 27 touchdown passes, which broke the rookie record Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson had shared at 26. The talent was never the question. The question was always whether the building around him could hold.
What comes next for Mayfield and the Browns
Cleveland at Tampa Bay, Sunday, 1:00 PM ET. Mayfield has found something in Tampa that he never quite got to keep in Cleveland: continuity, a head coach who backs him, and an offense built to his strengths rather than to somebody's idea of what a first overall pick should be.
He also spent this week wearing Michigan gear because Oklahoma, his college team, got stunned by the Wolverines in Week 2 and he lost a bet to Todd Bowles over it. That is the version of Mayfield that works: loose, all the way in on the joke, nothing hidden. That guy is hard to coach against and easy to play for.
The Browns, for their part, have moved so far past 2018 that most of the names in that quarterback room are gone. What they have not moved past is the shadow. Every year Mayfield plays well somewhere else, somebody in Cleveland has to answer for it again. This week the somebody is wearing a Tampa headset and he answered before anyone asked.
What I'm watching next: whether Mayfield says a word about any of it before Sunday. My guess is he says something short, funny, and completely unbothered. He usually does.
