The Promise of Baker Mayfield, and the End of the Browns’ Tortured QB History

The Cleveland Browns are the NFL’s “it” team this preseason. They have a dynamic young quarterback in Baker Mayfield. They have a star wide receiver in Odell Beckham Jr. They have a new coach, a new plan, and renewed hope ... and this time that hope seems warranted. So how did the Browns go from leaguewide laughingstock to potential model franchise of the future? Welcome to Trust the Browns’ Process Week, when we’ll explore how Believeland reached this point—and what comes next.

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September 16, 2007

Quarterback No. 10

If you want to pinpoint the moment when the title “Quarterback for the Cleveland Browns” devolved from a distinguished vocation into a running joke, it’s best to start by talking to Tim Brokaw. One September afternoon in 2007, Brokaw, who runs an advertising agency in downtown Cleveland, borrowed a Browns jersey from a friend to wear to that Sunday’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Then, using nothing more than duct tape and a Sharpie, he created perhaps the most effective concept of his career.

At that time the Browns were 0-1, having lost their first game of the season to the reviled Pittsburgh Steelers. That 34-7 final did not exactly come as a shock, given that the Browns had beaten the Steelers only once over the past seven years. A young quarterback named Derek Anderson was set to take over after the previous week’s starter, Charlie Frye, who played college ball at the nearby University of Akron, had been traded to Seattle for a sixth-round draft pick five days earlier. Anderson had lost all three games he’d started for the Browns in 2006; in the last of those, against Tampa Bay, he’d gone 10-for-27 with four interceptions.

In other words, things seemed especially bleak in Cleveland, a city that has long channeled its inferiority complex through sports, and particularly through its football team. The Browns had returned to the NFL as an expansion franchise in 1999, and since then the team’s casualties at quarterback had piled up like Spinal Tap drummers. Anderson became the 10th starting quarterback for an organization that had turned in only one winning season since then-owner Art Modell stole off to Baltimore in 1995, leaving behind a decaying wreck of a stadium on Lake Erie (which had since been replaced) and deflating what was left of the city’s ego. The Browns were already on their fourth head coach (Romeo Crennel) and seventh offensive coordinator (Rob Chudzinski) since being reborn.

Brokaw’s jersey was meant to reflect the angst of that perpetual churn. On it, he crossed out the original name on the back of the no. 2 jersey—that of Tim Couch, the no. 1 pick in the 1999 draft—and using nine pieces of duct tape, he wrote the surnames of each of the Browns quarterbacks who came after him. They trailed down the right-hand side like a Biblical verse:

Couch
Detmer
Wynn
Pederson
Holcomb
Garcia
McCown
Dilfer
Frye
Anderson

All of the names were crossed out except Anderson, who threw for 328 yards with five touchdowns in that day’s 51-45 win over the Bengals.

“I wore it to the tailgate, and the attention I was getting—it was almost a little too much attention,” Brokaw says. “This was back in the flip-phone day, and I’m taking pictures with people while I’m going to the bathroom. This was at the start of social media, so those pictures started to go around over email, mostly locally. It was just a quick visual of the suffering.”

At that moment, Brokaw says, Anderson seemed like yet another temporary answer to the larger existential question: What is this team even trying to be? The Browns wound up going 10-6 that season, barely missing the playoffs. But concern lay beneath the surface, from fans and writers covering the team (and perhaps even the front office itself), that no permanent fix was forthcoming. Anderson was not a franchise quarterback, and everybody knew it. Nor were any of the other QBs who preceded him, including Couch, who had been beaten down and sacked repeatedly until the Browns released him in 2004.

The feeling among Browns fans was all too familiar: Their city had once again been hexed. It was the same type of curse that had led to a more than 50-year championship drought for their baseball team, that had caused Michael Jordan to bury their best chance at an NBA title in the 1980s, that had resulted in the Cavaliers getting swept in the previous summer’s NBA Finals, and that had triggered the heartbreak of Red Right 88 and The Fumble for the 1980s Browns. And now it had seemingly concentrated its wrath on this renewed franchise’s quarterbacks.

Brokaw decided that perhaps he’d struck a little too close to the city’s nerve center to literally bear this burden on his back. He couldn’t handle actually wearing the jersey again, so he draped it over a mannequin in his agency’s storefront, assuming it would become an outdated curio when the Browns finally stumbled upon their franchise QB a year or two down the road.

Instead, Brokaw says, “it felt like Groundhog Day for 20 years.” Every time the Browns signed or drafted a new quarterback, local media would flock to his window to film the new name being scribbled on the jersey. People began to wonder whether the jersey itself was responsible for the curse. A local sports-talk radio host threatened to fight Brokaw. Somebody hurled a rock through the window.

In 2016, after the Cavaliers won the NBA championship and ended the city’s half-century-long title drought, Brokaw figured he had reason to take the jersey down. But the curse—or whatever it was—lingered, even as the jersey lay in a cardboard box in Brokaw’s storeroom: The Browns went 0-16 in 2017. Finally, in April 2018, the most hapless franchise in the recent history of professional sports drafted Baker Reagan Mayfield out of the University of Oklahoma, the Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback who seemed built to turn the page and bring the Browns into the future. That it took 20 years to get here still boggles Brokaw’s mind.

“It’s insane,” Brokaw says. “There is … you know … a sense of … you know … um … confidence?”

September 19, 1999

Quarterback No. 2

“God,” says Marla Ridenour, as we discuss Brokaw’s jersey and the many T-shirt imitations it inspired. “I can’t believe I’ve lived through all that.”

In the 1980s, Ridenour began covering the Browns for the Dayton Daily News. Three decades later, she’s still covering the team, now as a columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal. She watched the Browns barely miss Super Bowls in the 1980s; she watched them disappear to Baltimore in the 1990s; and she watched them regroup and flounder for two decades. The original iteration of the Browns would break your heart in key moments, she says, but the franchise’s recent ineptitude is an expansion-era development.

Ridenour could sense something wasn’t right about this version of the Browns from the start. They couldn’t settle on anything, becoming the manifestation of the NFL’s worst instincts, a short-attention-span franchise full of demagogic characters who kept taking stabs at drafting or signing potential saviors. The answer to every unsuccessful season was to turn over a huge portion of the roster and start anew, to fire assistants or head coaches or general managers, to bring in yet another quarterback who could maybe provide some semblance of stability at the position.

By the time Mayfield started his first game in 2018, the Browns had churned through 29 other quarterbacks, making this perhaps the most prolific run of ignominy at a single position on a team in sports history. “There are so many egomaniacs in the NFL that want to do it their way,” Ridenour says. “That’s part of the Browns’ problem. It wasn’t just that they picked the wrong guys—it was that they didn’t know how to nurture them, or how to surround them with the right people. They didn’t put in the right offense. It was a whole cluster of failure.”

Full disclosure: Marla and I worked together at the Beacon Journal in the late 1990s, and in the fall of ’98 I drove to Lexington, Kentucky, to watch and speak to the man who’d likely become the Browns’ no. 1 pick the next spring. I thought that Tim Couch was the real deal, and for the most part so did Ridenour, who insists that Couch is still the best Browns quarterback of the expansion era (at least until Mayfield proves he’s for real). I remember people telling me back then that he just looked like a franchise quarterback: tall, handsome, charismatic, and groomed for the job by his father since he was in grade school.

Couch reminded people of Peyton Manning, who had gone no. 1 to the Colts earlier that year. So the Browns took him in 1999, and it seemed that with a keen offensive mind in first-year head coach Chris Palmer and a front-office brain trust that included general manager Dwight Clark and team president Carmen Policy (who had helped perpetuate the 49ers dynasty in the 1980s and 1990s), Couch would bridge the gap between expansion and maturity.

“I mean, I was optimistic,” says Jonathan Knight, a Browns fan and the author of 10 books about Cleveland sports. “I was just as drunk as everybody else. It was based less in reality than, ‘We deserve this, for what we’ve gone through.’ We kind of forgot that we were Cleveland.”

The Browns initially planned to give Couch time to acclimate to a complex NFL scheme after playing in Kentucky’s simple Air Raid offense. They signed veteran Ty Detmer as a placeholder, but after a 43-0 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 1, the Browns—for the first of what would be myriad times—hurled their plans out the window. On September 19, 1999, Couch started against the Tennessee Titans. The Browns lost 26-9. Couch suffered through more than 100 sacks over the next two seasons; he broke a thumb during practice; the Browns went 5-27 between 1999 and 2000; and Palmer got fired and was replaced by Butch Davis. Couch changed his grip on the ball, then hurt his shoulder. By 2002, the fans had turned on him, cheering his injuries and nearly moving him to tears.

At that point, the Browns were pretty much willing to try anything. In 2000, they spent a sixth-round pick on a small-college quarterback named Spergon Wynn, who started one game and is best known for being the last quarterback chosen in that draft class before Tom Brady. But mostly, as Couch’s body and psyche unraveled, the Browns began to alter their team-building philosophy.

“Maybe they got scared off by the rookie high pick and they started going after veteran guys at quarterback instead,” Ridenour says. “But then I just feel like a lot of those guys were beaten down by the ringer the Browns put them through.”

January 5, 2003

Quarterback No. 5

Sixteen years later, as he drives home from moving his daughter into college in Tennessee, Kelly Holcomb wonders how different things would have been if the third-and-12 pass that he threw to Dennis Northcutt hadn’t bounced off his receiver’s hands. Maybe if the Browns had converted a first down and not fallen victim to a furious Steelers comeback during that AFC wild-card game, both his and the franchise’s trajectory would have headed down alternate paths.

But it’s also possible that nothing would have changed at all. Even back in 2003, the Browns had succumbed so completely to their own impatience that their failure had seemingly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “There’s been no stability at the quarterback position,” Holcomb says. “Or in that organization whatsoever.”

Holcomb arrived in Cleveland before the 2001 season as a 28-year-old out of Middle Tennessee State. He’d thrown 73 total passes in the NFL, all of them with the Colts in 1997, with one touchdown and eight interceptions. The assumption around Cleveland was that he would back up Couch, which he did that first season. But by 2003, Browns offensive coordinator Bruce Arians saw something in Holcomb, and as Couch wore down amid the injuries and the pressure, Holcomb stepped in.

Despite the inherent on-field dysfunction in Cleveland, Holcomb loved the feeling within the organization: the way the players got their shoes shined, had access to a massage therapist, and had someone who started their cars in the winter. He loved the fans, too, who treated him as well as any in the NFL ever did. But at the same time, Holcomb knew the Browns’ internal politics were precarious. In October 2002, the team’s original expansion owner, Al Lerner, died and passed on the team to his son, Randy, who some fans viewed as being primarily interested in his European soccer club. And when Cleveland lost that playoff game despite Holcomb passing for more than 400 yards, Butch Davis—who served as both coach and general manager in 2002—decided to reshuffle the roster once more.

“After that Pittsburgh game—which is still a bitter deal to me—there were a lot of personnel moves that were made, and I don’t think the guys that had been there agreed with some of those moves,” Holcomb says. “It’s kind of sad when you think about it. It’s sad for me. We had pieces in place and just didn’t keep it together.”

In the summer of 2003, Ridenour traveled to Tennessee to visit Holcomb at his house. When she got there, she says it was almost as if Holcomb—who would eventually outplay Couch for the job during that preseason—couldn’t quite fathom that he was on the verge of becoming a starting NFL QB. “I can’t believe you’re here,” he kept saying, and that’s when Ridenour had a feeling that this quarterback—as disarmingly nice as he was—might not last. Holcomb started eight games in 2003, with Couch taking the other eight. The Browns went 5-11. In 2004, Holcomb started two games, Luke McCown started four, and 34-year-old journeyman Jeff Garcia started 10. The Browns went 4-12, and Butch Davis resigned midseason.

Holcomb left for Buffalo that offseason, moved briefly to Philadelphia, and played a few games in Minnesota. He retired in 2008 without appearing in another playoff game. He’s still friendly with Couch, even after they spent those years competing for the same job. Perhaps that’s in part because they both recognize that they were dealt a bad hand.

“I don’t know if they had our backs,” Holcomb says of the franchise’s decision-makers. “I think it’s easy for a head coach, when he’s got two guys who can play, I think they kind of hold that over your head. When you start worrying about that, subconsciously, you start thinking in the back of your mind, ‘Hey, if I mess up here, they’re going to put him in.’ And you just can’t play that way.”

May 8, 2014

Quarterback No. 21

So the pattern was set: The Browns would try, fail, start over, then try again, fail again, and start over again. No quarterback has started all 16 games in a season for Cleveland since Couch in 2001, though if everything goes as planned this year, Mayfield should break that cycle. The Browns are on their ninth coach and seventh general manager since Butch Davis, and their third owner of the expansion era.

While all this was happening, Tim Brokaw’s jersey began to trail names nearly to the floor. There is now a lost generation of Browns fans who have grown up both seeing and presuming the worst. In a rust-belt region that’s long been driven by its passion for football, the Browns became a hopeless cause. And their Homeric odyssey to find a franchise quarterback was the overarching symbol of that futility.

The low moment? Take your pick. Maybe it’s Jake Delhomme starting four games of yet another lost season in 2010; maybe it’s the wilderness of the Brandon Weeden season in 2012, which began with him literally getting trapped under the American flag. There was the three-game reign of Ken Dorsey, who completed 47 percent of his passes with no touchdowns and seven interceptions in 2008; there was the time Jeff Garcia went 8-for-27 with three interceptions in a 2004 loss to the Cowboys.

“You know when you’re in the middle of whatever the shit is at the moment and you don’t even realize what the hell it is?” says Jarid Watson, who hosts a Cleveland sports podcast with Andy Billman, the director of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Believeland. “You just kept going OK, what next? Who next? Who’s the third-string quarterback? Because that guy will be starting by Week 15.”

“I hit the wall with Delhomme,” Billman says. “I really had this feeling like, ‘We’re fucked, and we have nowhere to go.’”

It’s kind of remarkable, though, how every time the Browns appeared to have bottomed out, they’d find someone else to provide their fan base with a glimmer of hope. Ridenour literally squealed with joy when the Browns selected local product Charlie Frye in 2005, even though she realized that the likelihood of him becoming a franchise quarterback was slim to none. Then came Brady Quinn (taken with the 22nd pick) in 2007, Colt McCoy (a third-round selection) in 2010, Brandon Weeden (also the 22nd pick) in 2012, Cody Kessler (another third-rounder) in 2016, and DeShone Kizer (a second-rounder) in 2017. These picks were the little rays of light that Browns fans needed to keep going. They allowed the fan base to subsist on an irrational belief that things had to turn around sometime.

“I did it with Kizer,” Watson says. “I did it with Quinn. I did it with McCoy. I did it with Charlie fricking Frye.”

“But I’ll tell you the ultimate faceplant,” Billman says, and before he even utters the name, I already know where he’s going. I know because literally everyone I’ve spoken to has mentioned the name. May 8, 2014. Cleveland once again has the ill-fated 22nd pick of the first round. And the Browns select Johnny Manziel, a wayward soul who was not prepared to be anything resembling a franchise quarterback, who reportedly showed up drunk to practice, and who may or may not have been taken in part because a homeless man in Cleveland suggested it to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, who bought the team from the Lerner family in 2012.

“Manziel was the low point,” Ridenour says. “That was a disaster from the get-go. You can find that [alleged] Patriots’ scouting report that was leaked out about him, and everything in it was true. The Browns weren’t doing their homework. All of that was out there. Just the whole failure to recognize it is what gets me.”

Maybe, Knight says, if the Browns had chosen to cultivate Brian Hoyer—himself a Cleveland native—rather than be dazzled by Manziel’s fleeting potential, they could have at least been, you know, OK. That’s what the franchise had come to by the mid-2010s: The bar was set so low that a slightly-above-average quarterback who could produce an 8-8 or 9-7 season felt like the best Cleveland could ask for.

“You just get so used to misery and complete incompetence, that if you see anything that is at all serviceable, you go, ‘OK, we can work with this,’” Knight says. “You know that saying about how in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king? That phrase has never applied anywhere better than the Cleveland Browns huddle.”

September 20, 2018

Quarterback No. 30

You can forgive Browns fans, then, if they aren’t sure what the hell they’re supposed to feel right now. The team has a truly dynamic quarterback, a colorful and (apparently) competent head coach, and a general manager who seems to know exactly what he’s doing. It’s like a strange dream. Some of the people I talked to, like Andy Billman, are unrelentingly optimistic. “This is going to be a total fucking faceplant if this doesn’t work out,” he says. “But I think 11 or 12 wins are in play. I’m in. I’m totally hooked.”

Others are understandably cautious, unsure whether they can trust their own buoyancy. “I do think we [in the media] look at the weaknesses they have and think that could be the fatal flaw,” Ridenour says. “We’ve gotten jaded. You don’t want to jump on that runaway train to the Super Bowl until it’s time.”

Don’t get me wrong: Everyone I spoke to is convinced that Baker Mayfield is an entirely different breed of quarterback than the 29 who preceded him since 1999. That became clear last September when, in his first professional appearance, he led the Browns to a swashbuckling comeback victory over the Jets, ended the franchise’s 19-game losing streak, and even delivered a timely put-down in the process. Mayfield exuded a kind of youthful swagger that Browns fans had waited decades to embrace; it was as if, with one win, he helped fans shake off years of self-loathing. And that feeling only grew over the second half of the season and into the offseason, when a mustachioed Mayfield bit into a beer can and shotgunned it at an Indians game, which may be the most Cleveland thing any quarterback has ever done.

But there are still things like luck to take into consideration, and the Browns haven’t exactly flourished in that area throughout their history. “A lot can go wrong,” Knight says. “This is great. I’m happy for everybody. Last year was a really fun year. But we’ve been here before.”

Still, Cleveland is not in the same place that it was 20 years ago, either economically (though deep issues remain) or emotionally. The Cavaliers winning a title lessened some of the Sisyphean burden that the city seemed to put on itself. This is still a football town above all else, but perhaps it’s more willing to believe than it was in the past. And Mayfield’s presence is a huge part of that.

The mannequin in the window of Brokaw’s advertising agency now wears a Mayfield jersey. Brokaw says he has no idea whether Mayfield is even aware of its predecessor, which now sits in that storeroom, in a container labeled “Box of Sadness.” If the jersey never comes out of the box—if it becomes the Cleveland equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant—Brokaw is totally cool with that. Maybe, he thinks, the Pro Football Hall of Fame will want it someday. Or maybe Mayfield will want to burn it if he goes on to lead Cleveland to a Super Bowl win.

Last Christmas, Brokaw sent out company greeting cards. On the front, a message acknowledged what a horrible and divisive year it had been in America. But, it said, there’s one thing we can all agree on. Inside were the before and after photos of the mannequin: the old jersey laden with surnames next to its replacement, which carried just one.

The caption: We won’t be needing duct tape for a while.

Michael Weinreb is a freelance writer and the author of four books.