Baker Mayfield Is Feeling Dangerous

He may not look like he’d be the NFL’s scariest young quarterback, but in just one jaw-dropping season, that’s what Baker Mayfield has become—all while turning the woebegone Browns into the league’s most talkedabout team.

- Clay Skipper

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.