Browns: Baker Mayfield was 8th best QB in 2020 according to PFF

PFF named Baker Mayfield the 8th best quarterback during the 2020 NFL season, a sentiment that many are starting to agree with.

Baker Mayfield had a heck of a 2020 season. He silenced a lot of critics (though, not all), played his best football in his life, and led the Cleveland Browns not just to the playoffs, but to a playoff win. He did it with a rookie head coach with game-management issues (at times), a revolving door of offensive teammates due to injury and COVID-19, and a defense that was largely ineffective all year long.

Mayfield was 10th in the NFL in QBR.

This isn’t a surprise that Pro Football Focus ranked him on their list of the top 101 players in the 2020 NFL season. He ended up landing 45th overall on the list, the 8th best quarterback and 3rd best Browns player behind Wyatt Teller (18th) and Myles Garrett (43rd). I’ve long said that Baker Mayfield was a top 10 quarterback in the NFL during the 2020 season but even I didn’t have him 8th.

The list is only about the 2020 season and post-season, so some of you who are going to rage comment, take a deep breath. It’s ok.

The seven names over Mayfield make sense, Aaron Rodgers (2nd overall/1st QB), Tom Brady (4th/2nd), Deshaun Watson (6th/3rd), Patrick Mahomes (7th/4th), Josh Allen (13th/5th), Russell Wilson (14th/6th), and Ryan Tannehill (17th/7th).

Now, the gap between 17th and 45th is pretty big, but since this isn’t a list of importance by position, just how good you are at the given position, it’s really not that big of a deal. It also may not seem like a big deal but not counting practice squad players, there are well over 2,000 players in the NFL, and being ranked above nearly 90% of the league is pretty impressive.

What this list doesn’t take into consideration is that Mayfield had some of his worst games either at the start of the year, with minimal practice to learn a new system, in games where he was forced to play with practice squad players, or in games with some of the fastest wind speeds in the last century.

Save for the first Pittsburgh Steelers game, even then he played without Nick Chubb, there really wasn’t a truly “bad game” that Mayfield played where you sat down and said, “Yeah, he just played bad.”

Mayfield only had two, multi-interception games (two against the Colts and Steelers) and those came in back-to-back weeks. He finished the final nine regular-season weeks with only one interception to his name. Two if you count both playoff games. That’s still just two picks across nearly three months of football.

You generally want some consistency before making bold statements like “he’s an elite quarterback”, so we’ll hold off on saying he’s among the top-10 talents for now. He did have a top-10 season in 2020, however, and PFF agrees.

If Mayfield can have a repeat in 2021, then all bets are off on where Mayfield’s “ceiling” is. He already took the Browns to the playoffs and beat the Steelers twice in a season (and in back-to-back games), so who knows what Mayfield can do.