Panthers quarterback Baker Mayfield will be facing his former team in Week 1 and he’s admitted that the game means something extra because of how his time with the Browns came to an end.
Mayfield denies that extra emotion led him to tell Cynthia Frelund of NFL Media that he is going to “fuck them up” in the season opener. Frelund relayed the quote during a recent podcast appearance and it drew enough attention on Tuesday that Mayfield was asked about it on Wednesday.
Mayfield said he always wants to win, but that he never said what Frelund quoted him as saying.
“First, I didn’t say it,” Mayfield said, via Joe Person of TheAthletic.com. “Obviously everybody’s going to write whatever story they want, there’s historythat I played there the last four years. I’m an extremely competitive person. Everybody knows that. If I wasn’t wanting to win then there would be a really big issue with me being the quarterback here. I want to win in everything I do. That’ll never change. That is not how I phrased it. It’s not even what I said.”
Browns defensive end Myles Garrett said “we’ll take it and we’ll use it” in reference to Mayfield’s purported quote about the matchup, but one imagines there wasn’t much need for extra motivation to kick off the season with a strong performance against the former Brown.
