Baker Mayfield remains in a league of his own
Baker Mayfield remains in a league of his own
The former walk-on's success is nothing new around Norman. How Mayfield, who will soon have a statue in OU's Heisman Park, captivated a fanbase makes his legend so rare.
Decades from now, the stories they tell about Baker Mayfield won’t sound real. Because if you weren’t there for it … well, you just had to be.
Three years ago, Oklahoma celebrated the football program’s 125th season in operation, sparking plenty of columnists and content producers to churn out rankings of OU’s best players.
Mayfield was at or near the top of most of those lists, but to say No. 6 is the best Sooner ever is tricky. You can make the argument, and many have. But A) I’ve always felt it difficult to compare the talents of a quarterback to, let’s say, a defensive tackle, and B) how do you measure the importance of a player from one era of the sport to another?
There’s a lot of nuance to the conversation, which doesn’t always make for the most exciting opinion pieces in our current hot-take climate. So I’ll say this, I don’t think Mayfield is the best football player to ever come through Oklahoma. Perhaps you think otherwise, and that’s completely fine. He is undoubtedly in the conversation, I just think it’s Lee Roy Selmon.
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Buuuuuuuuuut.
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I’m not sure a Sooner has ever been loved as much as OU fans love Mayfield.
His appeal is easy to understand. He bet on himself by walking on at OU,
the school he grew up admiring and attending football games with his family. He made it known he hates OU’s rivals, frequently poking at the ‘Horns and Cowboys during and after his college career. He trash-talked anyone who would listen to him and planted OU’s flags on fields that he saw fit for some new decoration.Mayfield won a lot of football games. He led OU to three Big 12 championships and two College Football Playoff appearances. He got a rule changed within the Big 12. And as noted earlier, he won OU’s sixth Heisman Trophy.
Upon entering the NFL, OU fans became enamored with the team that drafted him, the Cleveland Browns. So much so that Sportstalk 1400, a radio station based in Norman, started carrying the Browns on Sundays to ensure Mayfield’s pro journey was accessible in Oklahoma’s Cleveland County. Oklahoma City’s KOKH Fox 25 and KWTV News 9 were also flooded with requests to show the Browns on television, despite the local channels having zero control over the NFL’s programming decisions.
He remains a beloved figure by OU fans as the one who stuck around for four years (redshirting one of those seasons) and embodied a fanbase’s passion in a way few players do nowadays.
He didn’t have the pro-ready frame of Sam Bradford or the wheels of Kyler Murray. But the way he impacted his teammates elevated Mayfield to rare heights.
Suspended for one offensive series during OU’s final home game in 2017, Mayfield’s teammate and fellow captain, Orlando Brown Jr., carried his No. 6 jersey to midfield for the coin toss to ensure it was there for Mayfield’s last outing at Owen Field. The week prior, Mayfield was caught grabbing his crotch for all of national television to see during a game against Kansas and forcing then-OU head coach Lincoln Riley to hand out an unserious punishment.
The antics never bothered OU fans. It only made him more endearing to a community that hadn’t seen that kind of moxie before from their starting quarterback.
Of course, Mayfield wasn’t particularly liked by fans outside of Norman. In a way, he was a lot like Texas’ Sam Ehlinger. The type of guy you can only love if he’s on your team but hated if he’s not.
The big difference between Mayfield and Ehlinger is that one quarterback actually won when it mattered. The other struggled to get to the games that did.
Mayfield’s legend is likely to live on well past his playing days. Yet, it was hard to imagine that type of legacy for Mayfield when he first arrived at OU — you know, when Trevor Knight was still on top of the college football world following an improbable Sugar Bowl win over Alabama.
I really started thinking, man, this guy might be special, after Mayfield led OU back at Tennessee to a double-overtime victory. I knew he was special when he ran through Baylor, TCU and Oklahoma State to end that 2015 season and punch the Sooners’ ticket to the College Football Playoff.
It really started to sink in how much of a movie script Mayfield’s career has been after that one time in the spring of 2016 when I saw him run across Jenkins Avenue from OU’s stadium to the team’s makeshift locker room, located just south of Heisman Park.
A Jeep Grand Cherokee was driving north but stopped as Mayfield, in full pads and cleats, stuck his right hand out, inadvertently striking the pose of the trophy he now owns and making me think for a second, this guy might be invincible.
To think six years later, Mayfield will be able to cross that same street and look directly at a statue of himself is fairly unreal.
Most of his story, which adds another chapter with his statue dedication on April 23 following OU’s spring scrimmage, tends to be that way.
Not that anyone on the Internet really needs a reason to come up with an arbitrary power ranking.
Who doesn’t love an underdog?