Baker Mayfield, OBJ And The Rest Make It Safe To Dream

Since Baker Mayfield arrived in Cleveland in 2018, he’s changed his look more times than a chameleon navigating a rainbow. The curly locks that topped his scalp at Oklahoma gave way to a tighter cut upon his landing in Berea as a rookie.

Then the beard sprouted, eventually rivaling Miami Dolphins quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick’s in size before Mayfield’s summer wedding necessitated its removal. Ahead of captaining his second year of training camp, he whittled the facial hair down to nothing but a mustache, running short and tight across his upper lip. 

"That’s the elegance of having a mustache: You just don’t know what’s going to happen,” Mayfield says of his latest facial feature.

For nearly every season since the Cleveland Browns returned to the NFL in 1999, Browns fans have, sadly, known exactly what was going to happen. Training camp optimism rapidly gave way to the inevitable doom of the regular season.

Brandon Weeden got engulfed beneath the American flag, then proceeded to throw four interceptions. Charlie Frye was so battered by the Pittsburgh Steelers that he got traded the next day. Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver A.J. Green caught a touchdown because the Browns defense wasn’t set at the snap.

Outside of 2002 and 2007, the Browns have been trapped in the saddest Westworld narrative loop in the park.

And then it stopped. Last year’s opening day starting quarterback Tyrod Taylor got injured in Week 3 as the Browns trailed the New York Jets in a nationally televised Thursday Night Football game. And in strolled Mayfield, in the team’s gorgeous all-brown color rush uniform, like something out of a movie. 

You just don’t know what’s going to happen.

A few hours later, the Browns had won a football game for the first time since Christmas Eve 2016. More importantly, Mayfield was good. Really good. Throw-to-an-open-wide-receiver-before-the-defender-even-turns-his-head good. Woke up feeling dangerous good. 



It is strange to be in this position now, to use words like “good” when talking about the Cleveland Browns. It is stranger still to see Odell Beckham Jr., who fittingly arrived at training camp rocking a Stranger Things Nike hoodie, don the brown and orangier orange. 

Generational players that transcend every notion of fame don’t usually populate the Browns roster.

The team now has two of them, and that’s the type of thing that vaults expectations far ahead of schedule. 

The Browns offense is stacked. OBJ joins Jarvis Landry, Rashard Higgins and David Njoku to form one of the most skilled receiving corps in the league. Nick Chubb is poised for an enormous sophomore season. And Kareem Hunt joins the backfield in Week 8. 

A defensive line boasting a dinosaur-obsessed Myles Garrett and Larry Ogunjobi added Sheldon Richardson and Olivier Vernon. Greedy Williams and Denzel Ward will man the secondary for a decade. 

The collection of talent on the 2019 Browns would make a fan watching the team in 2010 weep and cry out “Take me with you!!” clawing at your pant leg, as you stepped back into your time machine.

As of early August, the Browns sport the fifth-best odds to win the Super Bowl, according to Vegas Insider. The Super Bowl. The AFC North, with a squabbling Steelers team, a Baltimore Ravens squad in transition and a Bengals collective that just sort of exists, is as open as it’s ever been.

Can we dream, then? Can we allow our minds to wander to Wild Card Weekend, with the Browns hosting a playoff game in front of 70,000 fans pinching themselves in unison to make sure this isn’t some sort of sick fever dream?

You just don’t know what’s going to happen.

“If you think the Cavs championship parade was something, just wait until the Browns win the Super Bowl.” That’s become something Clevelanders just say, like when Californians talk about the traffic or Floridians comment on the humidity.

This season is as close as we’ve been from turning that talk into a walk, from transforming that decades-old What if? into Oh my god, it’s really happening. 

We don’t know what’s going to happen, no more than Mayfield knows his next look. The darkest timeline, in which the team cracks under the sumo wrestler-sized expectations, lurks, waiting to come to fruition. 

But don’t give into that negative energy. The Browns are good, really good, could-win-the-whole-damn-thing good. The season remains an unknown, but after two decades’ worth of nightmares, it’s finally safe to dream again.