Buccaneers’ Baker Mayfield proving naysayers wrong with MVP-level season

The naysayers got it all wrong about Baker Mayfield. They called him a jerk, remember? A punk, remember?

And here we are, all these years later, the irrepressible quarterback too short to be the prototype who never stopped believing that he was always the best player on the field.

“My first memory of Baker, it’s the summer going from his eighth grade to ninth grade year, and the kids are in there playing this game we call Razzle around here — it’s like old time frisbee but it’s with a football,” Lake Travis H.S. coach Hank Carter told Serby Says. “I peek my head in there and you got this little short, not super fast not very tall kid that’s kind of barking orders and talking mess out there, but also just playing his butt off. It just reminded me of like a dog surrounded by all these big bulls and cows, and this small dog just running the show. He was just kind of a field general from the very start.”

Baker Mayfield has grown into the big dawg of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, carrying an injury-ravaged offense on his shoulders as the leader in the MVP clubhouse.