Quarterback Baker Mayfield said a lot during his lengthy appearance on the YNK Podcast, including that he felt the Browns did not respect him. But Mayfield has also acknowledged that he plans to do some different things in terms of leadership in his next stop – wherever that is. Towards the end of the 90-minute interview, Mayfield was asked if he was excited to have children gather around him in a new locker room. The general made it clear that his process would not be to try to make the children like him. “I am not going to force it. “I will be myself,” Mayfield said. “Because I feel like I tried to force it when things on the pitch were not going well, like the previous two years. I feel like I’ll go in there and be myself, because that has worked for me in the past. I will go in with the same work ethic and mentality. And if they do not like it, it does not matter. But when I step on the pitch and play with so much confidence that I am and what I think I will do on the pitch the next time I get the chance to do it, I will gain the respect of the kids who did it. I do not appreciate it from the beginning. “And if I’m worried about them, what do I do? They do not care if I like them. They want their general to win. They are trying to get paid. If their team wins, they get paid. So guys who do not like me personally, are okay. But I have to respect them. And the way I do that is just to cheat, to be myself. Because they can smell you in the morning – with heartbeats, if you are fake. They will smell it quickly. “ Mayfield was not asked about the report by ESPN’s Chris Mortensen that the Browns wanted “an adult” as fourth – a comment Browns owner Jimmy Haslam declined to make. But the general acknowledged that he was working to improve on top professional teammates in the locker room. As Mayfield put it, one of a general’s most important tasks is to persuade everyone to refrain from complacency. “It’s like, how do I get the most out of people who make a ton of money?” said Mayfield. “Because I could always motivate people when we were not making money. That was easy. I could get in their face, I could do all this because, you know, we were on the same pitch. “You get a pension after four years, you get benefits and all that. So how do you motivate people who are at this point and have already reached it? This is the biggest battle for me right now. I can motivate myself. I know how to do this. I did not always do it right. But I know how to do it. How can I get it out of everyone else? Because that’s the perspective of leadership to be a general. “I have to have everyone else around me to be better than they really think they are.” Mayfield added that “a bunch” of his energy goes to his leadership, in part because he knows how he is perceived and portrayed in the media about his teammates and their families. “When they go home at night, they will talk about how my general is behaving,” Mayfield said. “And it’s better to be a responsible guy who really cares about them as human beings – not just win. And how do you galvanize this? And that’s a huge issue. “ At this point, no one really knows where Mayfield’s next destination will be or when it will get there. But for whoever plays he could get a quarterback with a renewed appreciation for leadership and how important a team’s QB1 is.
