Baker Mayfield slides his considerable barrel of a body into a brown leather booth at a steak house just outside Cleveland and announces that tonight he's just not feeling himself.
This is not to say that the planet's most confident quarterback has arrived without his signature swagger—there is, after all, a diamond-studded medallion of Mayfield's jersey number, 6, hanging from his neck.
No, he means, simply, that he won't be ordering the Baker Mayfield Steak, a hallmark dish here at the tastefully suburban Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse. The handsome cut of beef that bears Mayfield's name—a filet mignon topped with a spicy cracked-peppercorn-and-cognac bordelaise sauce—appears on the menu, squeezed between the Steak LeBron and the Urban Meyer Steak.
When the restaurant first floated the idea of an honorific steak, Mayfield considered the offer premature. This was last fall, roughly midway through his rookie season. “We had barely won any games,” he says. “I didn't think I deserved it yet.” He might not have, but getting listed there on the menu with the sainted sports icons of northern Ohio after just one NFL season tells you something about how god-awful the Browns have been—and how lofty the expectations are now.
Before Mayfield unexpectedly took over as the Browns' quarterback, in week three of last season, Cleveland had won only a single game in the previous 37 tries. With Mayfield running the show, the Browns proceeded to win that game—and 6 of their next 13. Along the way, Mayfield—Cleveland's Mayfield!—threw for 27 touchdowns, an NFL rookie record.
Asked if he thinks he deserves the steak now, Mayfield hesitates before saying yes. “Just because I know where we're headed,” he adds. Where exactly that may be is a subject of fevered conjecture, in Cleveland and across the NFL. After this spring's addition of wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. to a roster that already features explosive talents like wide receiver Jarvis Landry, pass rusher Myles Garrett, and running back Nick Chubb, the good money says the Browns are likely to win their division, the AFC North, which they haven't done since 1989. (The NFL, for its part, is betting they’ll be entertaining to watch: though Cleveland has only played 11 prime-time games in the last 10 seasons, this year the Browns have three prime-time games in the first five weeks.) Mayfield figures that winning the division would take 10 or more wins.
As he tells me this, he pokes at his plate of chicken milanese, his bulky arms testing the stretch of his pale green hoodie. At six one, he's among the NFL's shortest starting quarterbacks, and he says he's put on weight—reaching a stout 220-ish—to protect himself from the hits he takes. Mayfield is built like a water heater. He's compact but hardly looks vulnerable. On the underside of his left wrist he's got a tattoo that reads, “Believe in Yourself.” And those three words are at the heart of the Baker Mayfield story—even if a tornado of doubt and criticism tends to tail in his wake.
When he arrived in Cleveland one year ago, Mayfield was a Heisman Trophy-winning number one draft pick. Critics pounced on his supposed shortcomings anyway. He wasn't tall enough, or mature enough, or not-Johnny-Manziel enough to accomplish what 20 starting quarterbacks in the past 11 seasons never could: restore optimism to a franchise that had gotten so bleak that its stadium became known as the “factory of sadness.”
Near our booth, a SportsCenter segment about the New York Giants catches Mayfield's eye. “I cannot believe the Giants took Daniel Jones,” Mayfield says, about New York's much-maligned draft-day decision to spend the sixth pick on the quarterback from Duke (whose college record was a measly 17–19). “Blows my mind.”
I tell Mayfield that I'm mystified that so many supposedly expert quarterback scouts seem unable to predict what makes a good NFL quarterback.
“Some people overthink it,” Mayfield says. “That's where people go wrong. They forget you've gotta win.”
It's not hard to sense that Mayfield is reflecting on his own history now. Despite compiling a 39–9 record in college, he faced a chorus of criticism before the draft. Those past slights are buried in a shallow grave. (A Browns teammate, Joel Bitonio, tells me that Mayfield plays with “the mentality of proving everybody who's ever said something negative about him wrong.”)
To Mayfield, the characteristics of a great quarterback are simple. “Either you have a history of winning and being that guy for your team,” he says, “or you don't.”
Mayfield, of course, has always been that guy. Winning might be new for Cleveland, but it's not for Mayfield, whose stories have, to this point, all involved him breathing his faith—and a bit of that swaggering self-belief—into the people close enough to feel it.
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There's a moment from Mayfield's rookie season that displays his charming brand of confidence. After leading the Browns to a 28–16 victory, Mayfield is asked by a reporter what clicked for him on that particular afternoon. Mayfield, with a subtle tilt of his head, says simply, “When I woke up this morning, I was feeling pretty dangerous.” He stands stone-faced for a moment, one corner of his lips turning ever so slightly upward, his eyes glistening with a knowing twinkle.
“Feeling dangerous” became his calling card, the slogan for his truly breakout season. The night after enjoying my Baker Mayfield steak at Hyde Park, I was able to sample a Feeling Dangerous beer downtown. Another local establishment announced a Feelin' Dangerous burger, complete with kielbasa and pierogies. In Cleveland, the energy in Baker's catchphrase seems contagious and helps explain why the Browns' losing season—they finished 7-8-1—seemed so damn winning. For the first time in a long time, Mayfield had the Cleveland Browns feeling dangerous. As Mayfield's own history shows, that shift in mind-set is powerful: You've often got to start believing you're a threat long before others can begin to see it.
Coming out of high school in Austin, Mayfield received only a handful of scholarship offers. Despite an impressive 25–2 record at Lake Travis, he couldn't shake the perception that he was too small to play at a truly big-time college program. His friends back home joke that he's still 12 years old, because he was the smallest in the group. Mayfield's own candor about his scrawny size takes me by surprise. “Looking back on it, I kind of was built like a little bitch,” he concedes of his pre-water-heater days.
With some encouragement from his dad, Mayfield turned down his scholarship offers. He instead enrolled at Texas Tech, determined to make the team as a walk-on. But he didn't just walk on, he swaggered on and somehow won the starting job. During an impressive freshman season, though, he injured his knee. With his status as the starter in jeopardy, he says he wasn't offered a scholarship for his sophomore season. So Baker made an even bigger bet. He decided to transfer to Oklahoma, the blue-chip program he grew up rooting for.
“It helped that I was emotionally attached to that school, just being a fan growing up,” he says. “I'm like, ‘This is where I dreamed of playing, but I also know that I can go play there. I believe in myself, so why not go do it?’ ”
Mind you: Oklahoma wasn't exactly in need of Baker Mayfield. The Sooners had just beaten Alabama in the 2014 Sugar Bowl, where their sensational young quarterback, Trevor Knight, had starred. Mayfield was undeterred. After just one semester at Texas Tech, he drove with his mom to Norman to enroll for the spring classes. He wasted no time seeking out head coach Bob Stoops, providing the coach with an early introduction to that Mayfield moxie.
“When he comes up to me, he hadn't bothered to call anybody about transferring,” Stoops remembers now. “You're not just transferring anywhere. We just ended up somewhere in the top five, six, in the country the year before, beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, and our redshirt freshman quarterback was the MVP of the game. He's gonna come and transfer to Oklahoma to play quarterback? So it just tells you all you need to know right there. That this guy, he came up and introduced himself, had a big smile and serious look on his face like, ‘I'm gonna do this.’ ”
Per NCAA rules, he had to sit out the upcoming season. He managed to excel at that, too. “I loved that year,” Mayfield says. He played intramural softball. “Two-time intramural champions. One of my biggest accomplishments,” he says. He also tried to play intramural football but was told, after one game, that this wouldn't be allowed. (He points out that his team won the game.)
By the time he was eligible to compete, for the 2015–16 season, he had won the starting job. At the end of that year, he finished fourth in Heisman voting. The next season, his junior year, he finished third.
But as a myth grows, so does national scrutiny. And in the off-season after his junior year, a slipup. Outside a bar in Fayetteville, Arkansas, cops asked Mayfield to provide a statement about an altercation he'd witnessed. Rather than stay put, he tried to make a run for it. Mayfield couldn't quite get around the edge. The officers tackled and arrested him. Making matters worse, the botched scramble was captured on the cops' dashcam video and lit up the internet. “I thought I was sneaking away. Look at the video: I put my hood on,” he says now, before breaking into mock commentary of the clip. “And he's off.… No, he's not.… Annnd he's caught.”
He can laugh about the moment now, but it didn't seem as humorous at the time. It was the first in a series of incidents that would earn him a reputation. Heading into his senior season, he was hyped as one of the nation's best quarterbacks, but critics began to wonder about his maturity. People were watching carefully.
More viral clips piled up. Some showcased his game-breaking performances, others became referendums on his personality. One, captured before a game against Baylor, showed him in a Karate Kid headband and a cutoff T-shirt, sauntering like a peacock and taunting the opposing players: “You forgot who Daddy is. I'm going to have to spank you today.” (Daddy threw three touchdowns in the win.)
Then there was the video culled from a game against Kansas, whose captains refused to shake Mayfield's hand at the pregame coin toss. He won the game handily, 41–3, but not before being caught on camera grabbing his man zone and offering the Jayhawks sideline some adult words you might generously characterize as “unsportsmanlike.” (Mayfield was told by his mother that his grandma watched the game and figured her grandson simply “had an itch on his crotch.” When I ask if she still thinks that, he says, “I hope so.”)
Of course there was also the flag plant heard round the Sports World. After a much-hyped matchup in which Oklahoma beat number two Ohio State in Columbus, an exuberant Mayfield tried to plant a giant O.U. flag into the center logo at Ohio Stadium. The field—carpeted with artificial turf—wasn't exactly receptive to flag planting, and the banner promptly fell over. The event was pretty spontaneous, he says. “A lot of things I do are orchestrated, but things like [that], in the moment, emotionally, I'm just being me,” he remembers. “I worked so hard to beat them after they beat us at home the year before that I was so excited and overcome with emotion that one thing led to another. But a lot of Ohio people didn't like me after that one.”
Not just in Ohio. Across the country, people shook their heads. The flag planting had became another thing. Mayfield says he knew it was a big deal when he heard from the “higher-ups” at Oklahoma that he needed to apologize, which he says was “just jaw-dropping” to him. “I won't even get into it,” he says. Then he gets into it.
Mayfield begins to recount how he was told that that type of display was not what Oklahoma football was about. As he does, you can see him getting worked up. “Actually we won. That's what we're about. I had done so much and worked so hard to play for that school, I was just kinda”—here he pauses to find the words, careful but not too careful—“almost embarrassed for them to tell me to apologize.”
But of course Mayfield did say he was sorry. I begin to ask him how heartfelt that apology actually was, on a scale of 1 to 10, but I can barely get the question out before he answers. “Zero,” he says. He repeats himself forcefully, looking me right in the eye so that I don't miss the point. “Zero. Absolutely not.”
Then the moment cools and the storm passes. “Which might hurt some Ohio fans' feelings,” he says. “But I think we're all good now.”
Ohio fans are indeed “good” with Mayfield now—at least in the northeast sliver of the state that he now calls home. Clevelanders are a resolutely faithful people, and in Mayfield—the quintessence of self-belief—they've found not just a plug for the LeBron-size hole in their collective heart but a replacement who personifies their chip-on-the-shoulder mentality. I mean, what's more Cleveland than possessing the blustering self-confidence to plant a cheerleader's giant flag into a turf field?
At a charity auction not long ago, a pair of dinner dates with Mayfield and his then fiancée, Emily Wilkinson, raised $96,000. One of his cleats fetched $14,000. In November a Browns fan announced on Twitter that if Mayfield re-tweeted his message, his wife would consent to his desire to name their forthcoming kid Baker. Mayfield did, and thus was born Michael Baker Tramel, photographed soon thereafter wearing a truly adorable onesie that said, “I came out feeling dangerous.” More recently, Mayfield appeared on the Jumbotron at a Cleveland Indians game and proceeded to shotgun a beer, firing up the crowd and sparking—like an angel in the outfield—a five-run rally for the home team.
Natural as the fit has become, it was not always obvious that Mayfield would end up here. The Browns had the number one pick, but the draft was loaded with quarterback talent. Even Mayfield doubted he'd be selected first overall. “I just didn't think anybody would take a chance on a little-over-six-foot quarterback,” he says. There were also the matters of his drunken arrest, his flag planting, and his itchy crotch.
Over and over, in his pre-draft meetings with NFL teams, Mayfield was quizzed about his character, about whether he was the type of guy who could shoulder the leadership burden of being a quarterback and the face of a franchise.
“Oh, God, it was sickening,” he remembers, sounding tired just thinking about it. “What were you thinking when you got arrested? What were you thinking when you played Kansas and grabbed your crotch? Are you gonna mature? Blah blah blah. If I could see the future, I'd tell you what's gonna fucking happen. But I think that was the best part about that process. I got to answer those questions for the first time, instead of the media putting it all out there. I got to answer it and say it in my own words.”
Though he figured he wouldn't go first, Mayfield was confident that he'd be selected quite high. So certain in fact that when teams with late draft picks sent him playbooks to review, he politely declined to study the material. “They hated it,” he recalls of a meeting with the San Diego Chargers. “They're like, ‘Are you serious?’ I go, ‘Yeah, you guys have the 17th pick.’ ”
If this sort of thing strikes some as blunt or discourteous, Mayfield might say that he's just being honest and genuine. Consider what Browns head coach Freddie Kitchens remembers as his first interaction with Mayfield: “The first thing I ever said to him was ‘Well, hell, you're not that short.’ He kind of looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing. He's like, ‘Well, you're not as bald as I thought you were.’ You knew that he had some fire about him.”
There's a real difference, Mayfield contends, between being arrogant and being certain. “I'm not going to act like I have it all figured out,” Mayfield says. “I believe in myself. Some people think that's cocky, but if you don't believe you're any good, then I don't think you're gonna have any success. If you go out there thinking you're gonna fail, you're gonna fail. Which is just the truth.”
Mayfield says and does what he believes to be true, even when it's against the QB's boring-above-all ethos. “Quarterbacks, by the textbook, are supposed to be reserved, cool, calm, and collected,” says Mayfield. “I do it my own way.” At one point last season, Mayfield said, “I'm not a cookie-cutter quarterback. Never have been. Never will be.”
“A lot of people in the world today, they don't like the truth,” says Kitchens. “They'd rather you just tell them something that they want to hear. Baker's not going to be like that. He's just going to tell you like it is. It's your problem if you don't like it. It's not his.”
Downtown Cleveland. It's a steamy Thursday in June, after a third week of summer practice. Baker Mayfield is holding court at a long wooden table at TownHall, a trendy Cleveland restaurant and bar.
It seems as if the whole city is rolling through the place, stray filings drawn to the magnet that is Mayfield. There's the rapper Machine Gun Kelly, a Cleveland native who credits the quarterback with setting off an extraordinary new excitement in the city. “Baker Mayfield is the most charismatic player to touch the fuckin' field, ever, in the history of the Browns,” he says. “He gave us hope—brought the fuckin' flame back to the city!”
There are also about 15 or so of Mayfield's teammates, moving through the bar. At one point Mayfield tells me that if he “tried to make everybody happy, that would drive me nuts.” It makes me wonder how that calculus works in the locker room: Does he care if his teammates like him? “I truly care about my teammates,” he offers. “And I know that if they don't care about me, then we're not gonna be worth a damn.”
Still, Mayfield suggests that being respected is more important than being liked. He may not be trying to be everyone's friend, but he is trying to inspire something in them. Mayfield's true magic isn't just that he believes in himself. It's that his confidence vibrates on such a high frequency that it infects those around him. “I've heard it over time,” Mayfield says. “ ‘When he's in there, the offense plays better.’ Or: ‘When he's in there, you can tell the team feeds off his energy.’ To me, that's the sign of leadership or being able to get the best out of your teammates.”
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Oklahoma head coach Lincoln Riley saw Mayfield lead in this way in Norman. He's not surprised by what's taking place in northern Ohio. “I think people, teammates, even potentially the city of Cleveland, say, ‘Shit, if a guy that's a six-foot guy, that's not very athletic, that wasn't recruited out of college, can win the Heisman, be the number one overall draft pick, do all this stuff, then why can't he help Cleveland win? Why can't he take Cleveland to the Super Bowl? Why can't he do this?’ And then,” Riley says, “maybe even his teammates within that locker room say, ‘Well, if he can do this, why can I not do it, too?’ And there's some of that belief, because his story, honestly, is so improbable. And if you talk to him or watch him, you would think that he's known it's going to happen all along.”
While his teammates mingle around him at the bar, Baker sits near Wilkinson, whom he'll marry in a few weeks. The two connected Mayfield's senior year at Oklahoma, when he tried unsuccessfully to woo her via Instagram. (He sent her DMs, but he also followed and unfollowed her in an attempt to attract her attention.) After some effort, she finally relented, and he invited her to the Rose Bowl to watch him play, gifting her an Oklahoma jersey and a seat next to his parents. Four days later, Mayfield moved in with Wilkinson (and her two brothers). Six months later, he proposed. (Mayfield says the courtship was characterized by him being “stubborn” or a “little persistent.” Wilkinson says, “I think he didn't want to lose.”)
Tonight, Mayfield looks relaxed. Doubt and expectation often weigh the same, and Mayfield's been carrying some combination of both for a long time. He's undeterred by the commotion that swirls around.
Wilkinson has a memory that sticks with her, a moment right after Mayfield's NFL debut in that week-three game against the Jets, just as he was beginning to orient Cleveland in the right direction.
After the game, Wilkinson remembers, she greeted him with excitement—“ ‘Oh, my God! You just won the game! Like, the first game in two years!’ ” She was thrilled. Mayfield, she says, was calm. “ ‘That's why I came here,’ ” she says he told her. “ ‘That's what I'm supposed to do.’ ”
Clay Skipper is a GQ staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue with the title "Baker Mayfield Is Feeling Dangerous."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Thomas Whiteside
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using Malin+Goetz
Produced by Joy Asbury Productions
Location: College of the Canyons, Santa Clarita, California
