The Cleveland Browns get set to face a familiar name this weekend when they travel to Tampa Bay, and Baker Mayfield spent part of his week reflecting on his years wearing orange and brown before the Buccaneers host his former team. Mayfield’s tenure in Cleveland remains one of the more complicated chapters in franchise history, filled with both a long-awaited playoff breakthrough and an eventual split that sent him elsewhere.
Mayfield explained how he chooses to remember his time with the Browns despite how it ultimately ended.
“I mean, with any experience, there [are] ups and downs, good and bad. Ultimately, you remember the good more so than the bad. Yeah, [we had] the first playoff win since ’94 there and [went] on the road and [did] it in Pittsburgh. So, [there are] a lot of good memories there, a lot of teammates that are friends for life. But like I said earlier, it’s a very different building now,” Mayfield said.
That playoff win Mayfield references remains one of the defining moments of his Cleveland career and one of the most significant victories in modern franchise history. Browns fans will always be thankful for him helping to end a decades-long postseason win drought on the road against the Steelers.
Mayfield has found stability in Tampa Bay, a sharp contrast to the uncertainty currently surrounding Cleveland’s quarterback room. While Deshaun Watson fields questions about his job security and fans debate whether Shedeur Sanders deserves a look, Mayfield enters Sunday as an established, productive starter for a Buccaneers team that has built around him rather than constantly searching for its next answer at the position.
There is no shortage of irony in how this matchup lines up. The quarterback Cleveland once moved on from now returns to face a franchise still searching for the stability he eventually found somewhere else.
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