Buccaneers division rival primed to make major gamble in offseason story
By Rob Leeds
Even the Buccaneers have been keeping up with the story going on with the Cleveland Browns and Baker Mayfield. It might make its way to the NFC South.
The Buccaneers are in the very fortunate seat of getting to watch other teams in the NFL make bad decisions rather than being the focal point of those decisions themselves.
Tom Brady at quarterback sure does have a way of fixing everything, right?
Still, even Bucs fans have seen something about what is going on in Cleveland. The allegations against Deshaun Watson are hard to miss, and everyone on the planet right now should know that Baker Mayfield is never playing another snap for that team, regardless of how Watson’s offseason goes.
The Browns, much like any other team with a starter serving as a very expensive backup, are now in a difficult spot as to what they will do with Baker for the future. You can’t play the guy after the falling out, but cutting him will make him one of the bigger dead cap hits in the league. Other teams know this, which makes it difficult to find a genuine trade partner on the market.
This has put most teams in a bit of a holding pattern as everyone is waiting on one side to blink first. Could the Browns cut Mayfield and make him a hot commodity on the free agent market? Or, perhaps Cleveland could find a trade partner with the Panthers, a team that currently has the worst starting quarterback in the NFL.
As it stands, that looks like the most likely contingency.
There's urgency from the Panthers and Browns to get a trade done for Baker Mayfield soon, per @jjones9 pic.twitter.com/WttTlSHp5f
— PFF (@PFF) June 14, 2022
It makes perfect sense that both sides are starting to look at this seriously. Both teams are starting to get into the swing of things in with camps, so it is perfectly reasonable that a team like the Panthers would want as many reps as possible for a potential starter.
If they don’t have faith in Sam Darnold or Matt Corral, which they shouldn’t for a lot of people that are on the hot seat, Mayfield looks like the only way to salvage some jobs.
There is still a way that this deal blows up due to some major instability on the franchise side of both teams, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the Buccaneers got a new starting quarterback on their upcoming schedule sooner rather than later.
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