An out-of-town view

AN OUT-OF-TOWN VIEW

By STEVE KING

Mark your calendars! 📅

Building the Browns RETURNS on April 5th at 11 a.m. pic.twitter.com/Wm1R1yAdOI
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) March 27, 2020

OK, so Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield did not play well last season.

Wow, news flash, huh?

Ad: Know somebody having a baby? This gift on Amazon will make everybody smile

Anyway, part of that is, of course, his own fault. Overall, he just didn’t look like the guy who performed so well in 2019.

So, then, he needs to get his own act together.

But as I’ve said over and over and over, the bigger part of why Mayfield struggled is because of the play – or lack thereof, as it were – of his offensive line.

To say it was terrible is being kind.

I made a point of revisiting that opinion in my last post, about the Browns – for some crazy reason – deciding to keep last year’s right tackle, Chris Hubbard, as a swing tackle for next season.

To piggyback onto that, I want to relate what I heard on the radio the other day. It is something I’ve heard a number of times nationally, including from this one guy several times. He’s Mike Valenti, the No. 1-rated – by far – sports talk show host in Detroit. He works at 97.1 FM The Fan and gives me the opportunity to hear an out-of-town view.

I really respect what Valenti says. He calls them as he sees them, as they say, and that’s especially the case when it comes to the NFL.

Valenti said – again – the other day that Mayfield played poorly in 2019 in large part because he couldn’t trust the line. He was bailing out and escaping the pocket to avoid getting crushed – yet another time.

No quarterback – not even the best ones, let alone a second-year player who came into the season still needing to learn about himself, his receivers and the league — can play well in a situation like that.

I’m hoping Mayfield enters the 2020 season with the eye of the tiger, and that his linemen – new and old, especially Chris Hubbard – do exactly the same thing, because they’re on the spot, too.