So retired NFL bloviator and NBC super insider Peter King has bad information on Baker Mayfield but a strong assessment.
As Joe wrote last week, King won’t go away. He won’t disappear into that good NFL night.
King continues to slow talk on Let’s Go, the SiriusXM NFL show with Jim Gray.
This week, King rambled about how he was extra down on Mayfield because Rams head coach Sean McVay didn’t want him after the 2022 season.
(Meanwhile, multiple Rams employees told Joe and Ira Kaufman at subsequent NFL owners meetings that the Rams would have been happy to keep Mayfield but Mayfield wanted to be a starter and Matthew Stafford was their guy.)
For King, McVay rejecting you from the club is a bad sign.
“And then at the end of [2022], Sean McVay chose not to keep him as a backup. … The point I’m making is that, you know, I just thought to myself, ‘Well, you know, if Sean McVay thinks that there’s some reason why he doesn’t want him either short or long term, that says something to me,” King said.
“I really respect Sean McVay, his judgment on quarterbacks. And it wasn’t really the right time for the Rams to take him, but the fact that McVay let him go and then he went to Tampa said something to me.”
Clearly, that’s why King angrily tripled-down on his Bucs-will-suck prediction for the 2023 season.
That’s all changed. Now, King sees a dominant force in Mayfield, a guy capable of changing games no matter who is on the field with him.
“To me, he’s the NFC Mahomes right now,” King said.
“He’s very hard to hem in the pocket. His instincts are so good right now. You can see it. He trusts his legs — when he has to move, when he has to stay. He’ll take a big hit and he delivers the ball so well downfield. This is peak Baker Mayfield. This is the guy who, John Dorsey, then the GM of the Cleveland Browns [in 2018] drafted him first overall, this is the quarterback he thought that he was drafting. And right now, to me,after six weeks, I don’t have one anymore, but if I had an MVP vote, he’d get my MVP.”
Joe loved that Mahomes analogy for Mayfield, at least through the last six games. It has been very Mahomes-like.