Line-Stepper Sports

In my unending pursuit of income that is both passive as well as degenerate, I have explored the godless vistas of FanDuel’s NFL page far and wide…

I pushed past preseason bets… waded through win totals… forged into futures… whatever it took to find the single most tasty, scrumptious, wallet-watering wager you can possibly make ahead of this NFL season. And it is this:

Baker Mayfield at +1200 to win the NFL Comeback Player of the Year.

I don’t throw money on sports like Drake at a roulette wheel. I’m selective. I’m intentional. But my esteemed reader, when I gaze upon the night sky above these odds in particular, the stars are brightly aligned.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but here we have a young quarterback that has struggled as a member of the Cleveland Browns… Brandon Weeden. Johnny Manziel. DeShone Kizer. According to the lazy narrative being spun by NFL media, this is the graveyard of over-drafted QBs Baker is destined to join…

But Baker Mayfield is not a bad quarterback. Get that and all those wack commercials of him wandering around an empty stadium out of your head.

In 2020, he led the Browns to their best record and first playoff win since the Clinton administration (first term!).

Then, in just week 2 of last year, he tore the labrum in his left shoulder. And rather than sit out (in the last year of his rookie contract), he played through it, despite worsening the damage as the season went on. Only now, post-operation and post-trade, is Baker finally back to full strength.

Listen, as a guy who’s suffered and recovered from this exact same injury, I can tell you two things for certain:

1. Percocet is as good as advertised

2. Throwing shoulder or non, this injury makes it a LOT harder to, well, throw things

Righty or lefty, any throwing motion you make requires you to coil both your shoulders together as you bring the ball back (do it with me now, kids) before you ultimately fling it forward. The non-throwing shoulder experiences plenty of muscle movement in that action, so it’s kind of a wonder to me how Baker executed NFL passes at all.

And that’s just picturing him sitting in a clean pocket making reads, doing anything under pressure or on the run feels extra impossible. Yet he toughed it out behind a declining o-line for 14 games last year and managed to win 6 of them. And what did Baker get for that valiant team-first effort?

Traded. He got traded.

(and replaced by the fucking Bill Cosby of massage parlors, but that’s a separate Browns catastrophe)

Now Baker Mayfield is a Carolina Panther. With a promising coach, capable weapons, and best of all… a giant chip on his surgically repaired shoulder.

As we all know, individual awards are won and lost on narrative at least as much as stats. Most of the other players in the running for this award get to say they are coming off an injury. It doesn’t make you special.

What makes Baker special is that he wasn’t just betrayed by his own body last season, he was betrayed by the very organization that drafted him. Number 1 overall.

And it wasn’t just any organization that cast him out. It was the new evil empire. The Cleveland Defendants.

The Browns as a franchise have exposed themselves as abhorrent and duplicitous so now everyone hates them (what a plot twist from the lovable losers we all used to know). 31 and a half cities will love nothing more than to dunk on them any way they can this season.

And what better way for national media to stick it to the Browns than to award Baker with the Comeback Player of the Year?

It sounds too perfect and movie-like until you remember that all the football reporters who decide this award are themselves amateur script writers who seldom oppose a healthy virtue signal. There are 3 players with shorter odds than Baker, but none of them can match his narrative potential.

Here’s Baker’s competition:

Derrick Henry (+400)

Jameis Winston (+500)

Christian McCaffrey (+800)

Naturally, as a literal 12-1 underdog, Baker is not, y’know, supposed to win this award. You can make ‘better’ cases for each player ahead of him, but you can sure as hell poke holes in them too.

Trust and believe, I got my hole puncher.

First thing you need to know; this is very typically a quarterback award. QBs took it all the past 4 years and 10 of the last 14.

The last time a running back won? Let’s just say you could still keep your shoes on at the airport.

If Derrick Henry runs for another 2,000 yards and stiff arms another dozen mere mortal DBs straight to the shadow realm along the way, he most likely will win. But even for football Shaq, that’s asking a lot.

The brutal style and sheer volume of Henry’s rushing attempts likely means at some critical point in time his skills will decline rather severely and suddenly. The Titans are not about to be championship relevant, so to pull this award off Henry would have to essentially recreate his monster 2020 season, only now coming off a foot injury, and on a team that’s worse than when he left it. At +400? Yuck.

Jameis.

I had a full sentence planned there but I started laughing out loud when I typed the name. I’m realizing it’s almost exclusively funny things that pop into my mind when I think of his underqualified mononym self. God I love him.

Eatin Ws? Hittin a crab leg lick? The only QB to ever throw 30 touchdowns and 30 interceptions in the same season? Jameis has been a blue-chip meme machine since he arrived in the league.

But I can’t profit off memes (I missed the Dogecoin window). +500 for the fucking founder of the 30/30 club is simply not whetting my appetite. Feels like tossing cash into a fountain.

Christian McCaffrey will win this award if he plays 15 games or more. Simple and plain. He’ll put up silly scrimmage yards and literally run away with it. However…

Do you really want any amount of your money directly attached to the health of 10-games-in-2-years McCaffrey? +800 is enticing but if you bet on Christian then I hope you’re also a Christian because prayer is indeed the only way you can have faith in that bet.

Look, entire football seasons can be hard to predict. Lots of moving pieces. Narratives, however, can be much simpler. And that’s where the value is at.

At +1200? The Baker Mayfield revenge tour is too good to resist.