No one has enjoyed Hue Jackson’s firing more than Browns QB Baker Mayfield

Baker Mayfield was a good Browns quarterback. Now, with Hue Jackson no longer guiding his way, he can be a good NFL quarterback.

The rookie passer recorded the best game of his brief career in Week 10, some 13 days after Jackson was mercifully relieved of his duties after a 3-36-1 stint as Cleveland’s head coach. The former No. 1 overall pick carved up the Falcons’ injury-riddled secondary en route to a 216-yard, three-touchdown performance in which he threw only three incomplete passes. With Mayfield showcasing the fire that made him 2017’s Heisman Trophy winner, the Browns got just their second win over a team with a non-losing record since September 2015.

Mayfield has shined despite a relatively weak supporting cast under new offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens’ spread-out system. In Jackson’s second-to-last game as the team’s head coach, an overtime loss to the Buccaneers, former coordinator Todd Haley concentrated Mayfield’s targets into a seven-player cohort, spamming passes to the often double-covered Jarvis Landry in the process. One week earlier, only six players had passes thrown their way, including another double-digit day for Landry.

But in each of the two games since Jackson and Haley’s departure, Mayfield has spread his pass attempts out to 10 different players. Landry’s targets per game have dropped from 11.8 to a much more manageable six. And, despite the de-emphasis on the team’s top wideout, this new plan of attack has bumped the Browns’ scoring output up from 342 yards of total offense per game under Jackson/Haley to 407.5 under the new regime.

Kitchens isn’t afraid to try new things — and with the Browns’ offensive depth chart constructed the way it is, he doesn’t exactly have much to lose. He made this readily apparent in Week 10 when he went full service academy and put three running backs behind Baker Mayfield in a wishbone formation.

His Browns ran three plays out of the wishbone, all on the same drive. They gained 16 total yards, including five on a post-handoff option pitch from Duke Johnson to Nick Chubb. It was weird, but it worked.

“We have a good package of things that we wanted that group of players to come onto the field,” interim head coach Gregg Williams said. “We also wanted to see how they would respond. How would they visualize or see the package? We had a good package of plays. We had a little no-huddle concept, also, if we needed to try to keep that package on the field. Very well-thought out on Freddie and the offensive staff on utilizing what we have here.”

That’s just one example of the spread-the-wealth philosophy Kitchens has employed to glean every ounce of talent from an overtaxed roster. In the past two weeks, we’ve seen:

It’s not all good, but it’s fundamentally different then the entirely-predictable game plan Jackson and Haley had the Browns running through walls to execute. By varying Mayfield’s targets, Cleveland has set a more amenable stage from which Mayfield can improvise. And that’s been vitally important, because

a) opponents are throwing constant heat at the rookie in the form of blitzes, and
b) Mayfield’s instincts are really, really good.

Cleveland’s offensive line has been an embattled unit in 2018. While Kevin Zeitler and Joel Bitonio have remained solid on the interior of the line, the team’s protection against edge-blitzing pass rushers has been lacking. Joe Thomas’s retirement took a future Hall of Famer out of the lineup at left tackle. Starting in his place is undrafted rookie Desmond Harrison, who’s been better than expected, but still very much not Joe Thomas.

His bookend at the other tackle slot is Chris Hubbard, another undrafted player who had just 14 career starts in four years before coming to Ohio. If either needs to be spelled, the team’s swing tackle is Greg Robinson — the former No. 2 pick who washed out with the Rams and Lions before donning the brown and white.

This is all a very long way of saying opponents have had few concerns about blitzing the Browns to take advantage of their weakness on the corners. Following Week 7, Cleveland’s quarterbacks had been sacked on 10.3% of their dropbacks, the 29th-best rate in the league. Mayfield had been dropped behind the line of scrimmage five times in his second, third, and fourth starts of the year.

But he got better. Especially in the last two weeks under new offensive coordinator Freddie Kitchens.

Mayfield was blitzed on a whopping 45 percent of his dropbacks Sunday. Not only did he avoid taking even a single sack, his ability to identify holes left by blitzing linebackers and single-coverage down the field led him to a perfect passer rating when Atlanta attacked his pocket.

The key to this success wasn’t a sudden upgrade in blocking, it was Mayfield’s ability to unload the ball quickly in stressful situations. Only two quarterbacks in the league had less time to throw than Mayfield’s 2.29 seconds in the pocket in Week 10, Ben Roethlisberger (who was great) and Josh McCown (who was decidedly not). One week earlier, he clocked in at 2.54 seconds in the pocket, fifth-lowest in the league.

The difference between Hue Jackson/Todd Haley Baker Mayfield and his Gregg Williams/Freddie Kitchens counterpart is stark:

Some of that can be explained away by Mayfield’s growth as a rookie quarterback, but there’s no denying he’s been better in his last two weeks with Jackson gone. On Sunday, he’ll face his former head coach. He is delightfully unfazed by this.

The Heisman winner is proving he can thrive under pressure when he’s surrounded by a long list of targets — even if they’re pieces of Cleveland’s not-at-all star-studded receiving corps. Kitchens is giving him every opportunity to figure out the players with whom he can best mesh. That’s been successful at fending off opponents’ blitz-heavy defenses and finding holes downfield, staging arguably the franchise’s biggest win since 2014 in the process.

But opposing defenses will adjust to this, and the next step will be finding Mayfield’s sweet spot against complex, interwoven coverages that afford him more time in the pocket but fewer windows of opportunity downfield. That’s the kind of test the rookie may need an upgraded receiving corps to ace. If Sunday’s performance is any indication he’ll be an eager exam taker along the way.