00:00Good for Baker Mayfield and good for Browns fans.
00:04You want to know why?
00:05Yeah.
00:06All right, so he signs a three-year extension, $160 million.
00:09That's nothing to fart at.
00:11That would put him in the franchise quarterback category.
00:14Like, I've always been kind of ticky-tack with you,
00:17and I've even brought it up with callers,
00:19because I have been annoyed, too, at some of the revisionist history
00:22that we've caught people on where, like, I've had people write about
00:25how bad the Browns are and how terrible they are
00:29and how if we would have just kept Baker Mayfield,
00:31and I'm like, I got the receipts.
00:32I know what you wrote four years ago about Baker Mayfield.
00:35Here, I'll put the screenshot next to each other about what you said.
00:40Our comments, though, are public.
00:42Their comments usually aren't.
00:44So, yeah, people flip-flop, and they do that all the time with quarterbacks.
00:49I am 100% on the record, and you have backed me up on this.
00:54This is a show that loves to call me out for maybe misremembering things.
00:58I did not think Baker was long for Cleveland.
01:01I thought that we should have brought in a veteran to compete
01:03and held on to him because I didn't think we just could give him up.
01:08And then they went and they traded for Deshaun Watson,
01:10which is a trade that I did not want to happen a million times over.
01:15But you've heard so many opinions on it over the years
01:17that maybe you get it crossed up.
01:20Again, Anthony remembers these things.
01:22We keep long score, long-term with each other.
01:24He would have thrown it in my face.
01:26But I was one of the people who go, man, he seems broken, too.
01:29There's something wrong here.
01:30This is bad.
01:32This is not good.
01:33People forget about the year in Carolina.
01:36And he's done well after the year in Carolina because it finished up in L.A.,
01:40and that seemed to kind of get him reset with Sean McVay.
01:43And then, obviously, he's done a pretty fine job down there at Tampa Bay,
01:46I'd have to say.
01:48Whether or not you say he's a Super Bowl-winning quarterback,
01:50I think that's a relative conversation because Sam Darnold has won a Super Bowl.
01:54I think a lot of people didn't think that he'd be a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
01:57So I think that door is definitely open.
01:59But this is the reason why I say good for Baker, good for us.
02:03Because for Baker, yeah.
02:05I mean, you were almost given up on.
02:08You were seen as a bust, an afterthought.
02:10Now you've made a boatload of money,
02:12and you're going to continue to get paid a boatload of money.
02:15And it should, I mean, with how this contract is,
02:19I don't think it's going to be crippling at all to their cap,
02:22so they should be able to put some people around him.
02:25Why do I say it's good for Browns fans?
02:28It can be good for Browns fans.
02:31And the reason I say it is because this has been a franchise
02:33that if you pay attention to the history since the Haslam's owned it,
02:37they have tried to overcorrect mistakes.
02:41I think they're getting a quarterback next year.
02:43And I think that it's not always going to be peaches and cream
02:47with that quarterback.
02:48And they are going to exhaust every option possible
02:54and not freak out with that quarterback
02:57before they actually were to give up on the guy.
03:00They're going to do everything they can.
03:02I think they'll be more judicious with how much power the young man gets
03:06as far as picking coaches, the rearranging schedules,
03:11all the things that we had heard with Baker here.
03:14I think that they're going to be a little bit tighter on that.
03:17I hope so.
03:19Because it has been a team that has, again,
03:22tended to overcorrect their mistakes from the past.
03:24And one of their mistakes was it was too much too soon for Baker
03:26to have that type of power within the organization.
03:29He wasn't ready for it.
03:30I think that he even would probably admit that right now.
03:32He's much more ready for it now because he's an older person.
03:35He's a much more mature person.
03:37And I hope that the Browns would learn from that mistake
03:40and it would serve them better.
03:41And hopefully we can actually get this quarterback situation right next year
03:45instead of languishing out in the middle of the ocean
03:48like we've been doing for the better part of going on three decades now.
03:53Go ahead.
03:54You know, it's interesting.
03:55Baker's now 31 years old.
03:57And where does the time go?
03:58I know.
03:59And we talk about, man, if Baker was here,
04:03if Baker was here right now.
04:05I actually, I know this is, it was so rock bottom with Deshaun Watson,
04:10even though we did make the playoffs, you know,
04:12the year of the Flacco went on the amazing run,
04:14notwithstanding, that people think had Baker have never left,
04:19then the Browns would be in this great spot.
04:21And I'm like, man, you guys forgot how bad it was at the end for Baker.
04:25And that when we brought on national people at the end of the year,
04:28they almost all came on and said, you got to move on.
04:30You got to move on.
04:31There were other, remember Kirk Cousins, that was a big,
04:33that was a big discussion.
04:35And we couldn't find a lot of people that were like, no,
04:39this is going great with Baker Mayfield.
04:42And there were those out there.
04:43And certainly, I mean, we, we did,
04:45we did every day the Baker wars at the end.
04:49And it was rock bottom for Baker.
04:51And at least we thought, and then he went to Carolina and it was bad again.
04:54So I play in scout team defense.
04:56I will never be under the belief that we should have just kept him.
05:00Everything would have been fine.
05:01Yeah.
05:01Like just because it got so bad with Deshaun Watson,
05:04the assumption is it would have been better with Baker.
05:06And I'm like, man, he,
05:08he did not just magically heal from that injury and then have great football
05:12right afterwards.
05:13And there was some soul searching the McVay thing,
05:16even though it was, how long was he even there?
05:18But that was given a lot of credit last few weeks of the year,
05:22but it did seem to be like,
05:23it did seem to kind of settle them down and have him play confidently again
05:26and show him that he can still do this at a high level.
05:29Cause I mean, there were some, I know we remember 2021,
05:32but there were definitely some really good times with Baker Mayfield as well.
05:35Oh yeah.
05:36Like as, as bad as things did get in 2021,
05:38we're not going to sit here and act like there wasn't good things in 2020.
05:41And there wasn't good things in 2018 or anything like that.
05:44It was uneven, but I think had everybody had calmed down,
05:48like my argument is that we wouldn't be in this,
05:51this wonderful feeling of, of Kumbaya.
05:54And we'd be counting Superbowls or anything like that.
05:57It's just, it's better than this.
05:59And it would be much better than this arguing about whether or not,
06:03like I, I can't put them in the same category as Josh Allen.
06:07Maybe I could put them in the same category in some way down in Cincinnati,
06:10not with overall talent.
06:12Like Joe Burrow is a, is a Supreme talent, but it's like, Hey,
06:15are we going to be able to punch our ticket here with this guy?
06:17Like what's going on here?
06:18Is he going to threaten to leave?
06:20Is he not going to threaten to leave?
06:21Like what's going on?
06:22Maybe that's a comparison,
06:23but I'm trying to think of like a high level, maybe even rivers.
06:26Maybe that's the guy,
06:27like a high level guy who's been able to put up some numbers who, yeah,
06:32you take your respect as a quarterback,
06:34but do you take them seriously in January?
06:38How serious do you do it?
06:39Like, maybe that's it still.
06:40We could have that argument all day long.
06:42It's still better than what the arguments we've been having here over the last four
06:45years.
06:45And so that's where I hope that the Haslams are and the Browns are on all this,
06:49where it's like, Hey, you know what, what happened, happened.
06:51There's nothing we can do to change that.
06:53I don't think he was ever going to be a free agent.
06:55All right.
06:55If he played well, excuse me,
06:57if he played well this year,
06:58I don't think he was ever going to be a free agent.
06:59They were either going to sign him to a long-term deal or they were going to
07:03franchise tag him and move on.
07:04So I wasn't worried about the Pittsburgh thing,
07:06which was a weird question that Keith asked me.
07:08I kind of wanted to throw it by you,
07:09but I think that, that the history, we can't revise it.
07:12We can just learn from it.
07:14And I hope that we learn from this situation.
07:16Cause I like,
07:17I hope I've not given everybody the idea.
07:20And I don't think I have,
07:22and I don't think you have that all we need to do is get to April.
07:25And then once we have that guy, we're going to take, no,
07:27we're going to have, we're probably going to have some, some moments.
07:30We're probably going to have some questionable moments with that guy.
07:33We're probably going to have some moments where we question him,
07:36question what he does.
07:37Like it's sports.
07:38It's professional sports.
07:40It's a team game.
07:41It's going to be difficult.
07:42Look at the Baker draft.
07:43You can make the argument.
07:44He ended up being the fourth best quarterback in that draft.
07:46And we did all the time.
07:47And we took him number one overall.
07:50So just, just, just having a pick in the draft, it's high, you know,
07:54depending we,
07:55who knows what pick we're going to have in next year's draft.
07:57We can have number one overall.
07:59We could have number eight, nine, 10.
08:02It's not even about number one,
08:03but if you were to end up with more Manning,
08:07uh, Trinidad Chambliss, like it's like,
08:10Hey, you're going to have to be patient.
08:11Like there's going to have to be,
08:13and we're going to have to calm some people down and go,
08:15let's go to the table before we go to the mattresses here.
08:17And let's have a conversation here before this becomes an all out war.
08:20I know we got to go.
08:21Do you think Baker can win the Superbowl with Tampa Bay?
08:25I still do.
08:26I still do not.
08:28I still am not a believer after all these years,
08:30all this money, all this volatility.
08:33I don't think they can this year.
08:35I think they can in three years.
08:37I think they can in two years.
08:38Do you think his body is going to hold up?
08:40I don't know.
08:41Over time.
08:42That, that, I don't know.
08:42That was always the thing about Baker that he wasn't Josh Allen.
08:46He, he couldn't absorb all those hits and still be able to do all the things he wants to.
08:51You could see it last year.
08:52The minute that his injuries just kind of pile up over the season.
08:56Yeah.
08:56I will never question his fortitude.
08:59Yeah.
08:59He's tough.
08:59You know, resiliency.
09:01That guy is going to bring it.
09:03I just think he doesn't have the body that these other guys do.
09:05Even Patrick Mahomes, who, who gets worn down.
09:08He doesn't have those gifts to be able to do that.
09:11And now those hits, the toll just keep piling up.
09:14I want you to.
09:15And I wonder if he's played his best football.
09:17I don't know that he's going to get any better.
