Baker Mayfield and the Great Underdog Myth
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Half a story is better than none, I guess. And the half-story people know about Baker Mayfield—unwanted quarterback from nowhere who toiled in anonymity, patiently and persistently worked his way to the top, successfully walked on and earned the starting job at two different Big 12 schools—is 100 percent inspirational but not 100 percent accurate.
Mayfield was a walk-on at Texas Tech, and while he did well there, he still couldn't get a scholarship. So he went to Oklahoma. Again, without a scholarship. Now he is a star quarterback, one who finished fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting, and maybe the biggest reason the Sooners have gone from relative mediocrity to this year's College Football Playoff.
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They should make a movie about this guy. He's like the double Rudy, right? Not quite.
"Uh," Mayfield told Bleacher Report, "I don't think I could do what Rudy did."
Mayfield was not some Podunk kid. If he were a jalopy, then he came out of a Lamborghini plant.
He was the star quarterback of a state championship team at a school in Texas—Lake Travis in suburban Austin—that might as well be called Quarterback High.
"He's an underdog from the standpoint that he didn't have high-profile college programs giving him offers, but he's a stud, and he has been for a long time," Lake Travis Cavaliers head coach Hank Carter said. "He didn't get the big-time offers because of his stature; he was a late bloomer physically. And also, honestly, I think our quarterbacks sometimes get a bad rap.
| Quarterback | College(s) |
| Todd Reesing | Kansas |
| Garrett Gilbert | Texas, SMU |
| Michael Brewer | Texas Tech, Virginia Tech |
| Baker Mayfield | Texas Tech, Oklahoma |
| Dominic De Lira* | Iowa State |
| Charlie Brewer (class of 2017) | SMU (offer) |
"So many of them play in college that sometimes people think they're just system guys. It's happening to our guy this year, Charlie Brewer, who has just one offer: SMU."
A few things about that. SMU is coached by Chad Morris, who was the coach at Lake Travis six years ago. Morris won a state championship there with quarterback Garrett Gilbert, the blue-chip recruit who was supposed to continue the Vince Young-Colt McCoy line of great quarterbacks at the University of Texas. Despite a rocky college career, Gilbert is now on the practice squad of the Oakland Raiders.
And Brewer, the Cavaliers' current quarterback? His brother, Michael, a former Lake Travis quarterback, finished his college career by throwing for 344 yards in Virginia Tech's 55-52 win over Tulsa in the Independence Bowl on Saturday.
Remember when Kansas went to the Orange Bowl in 2008? The Jayhawks' starting quarterback that year was Todd Reesing. Guess where he played in high school?
If Charlie Brewer starts a game for SMU, he could be the sixth consecutive Lake Travis quarterback to start an FBS contest. (Iowa State's Dominic De Lira would be the fifth.)
You'd think Big 12 coaches would be waiting in line to offer these guys, but somehow they aren't.
"You can talk about any aspect of my journey," Mayfield said Monday, three days before No. 4 Oklahoma plays No. 1 Clemson in a playoff semifinal. "The experience makes me who I am."
Of course, the part he's talking about was how he ended up with the Sooners. Mayfield acknowledged that he's still bitter about not being recruited by big-time programs. Which team is he most upset with?
"TCU," he said. "They told me they were going to offer me a scholarship and kind of drug it out. I told other schools I wasn't interested because I thought I was going to be there. They disappointed me and kind of hung me out to dry right before signing day."
Has he ever spoken with Horned Frogs head coach Gary Patterson about that?
"No," Mayfield said. "He doesn't like me, and I have no comment about that."
Mayfield said he wouldn't take the high road if anyone ever apologized for not giving him a scholarship, for not believing in him.
"I don't think it would go very well with them," he said. "I don't think I'd hold back if I ever had a conversation with anybody that truly passed up on me."
And there are quite a few.
Mayfield ended up at Texas Tech and even became the starting quarterback in 2013—without a scholarship. The Red Raiders started 5-0, but Mayfield got hurt. When he came back, his play dropped off. And the way Mayfield tells it, head coach Kliff Kingsbury wouldn't guarantee him the starting job or even a scholarship.
Mayfield left for Oklahoma, though Texas Tech tried to block the move. But after sitting out a year under NCAA transfer rules, Mayfield has finally arrived in the big time.
Sooners head coach Bob Stoops told me earlier this year that he didn't know Mayfield was coming until he showed up. Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables said the biggest difference between Oklahoma's failed 8-5 season last year and its national championship-contending one this year is Mayfield.
So it's your basic bootstrap-pulling tale about a quarterback who made it big after going to a quarterback factory.
Wait, no, that doesn't sound as good as the half-story we usually get.
So what's the Lake Travis secret?
"Good coaching," Mayfield said. "I say it all the time: Texas high school football. It's no joke. It's a big deal. And when you get good coaches like I had at Lake Travis and then you play other good programs, it develops you very quickly, and it gets you going."
It's more than that. The area Mayfield is from seems to be a small pocket of the world known for two things: quarterbacks and Willie Nelson.
Mayfield may not have had any Big 12 offers coming out of high school, but he had one of college football's greatest offensive minds in Morris coaching him as a 15-year-old. In fact, Morris prided himself on involving kids as young as seven in the program at Lake Travis.
"We had a seven-on-seven program that went down to second- and third-grade kids," Morris said. "So we had identified our quarterbacks down to that grade. We figured, 'Why not? They play Little League in baseball.'
"In the month of May, we would play against ourselves, and right after, at 6 o'clock, the younger kids would come out. The little kids would come out early and watch the older kids, and they'd wear the exact same uniforms as the older kids. And it got them to really want to be a Lake Travis Cavalier."
Carter, the current Lake Travis coach, has kept the system in place. He said his team mimics colleges with a hurry-up, no-huddle spread offense, and the quarterbacks on the roster improve by competing against each other all the time. Mayfield agreed.
If that's not a big-time pedigree, I don't know what is.
"Everything along the way has made me the competitor I am," Mayfield said. "All the different coaches and styles of play I've seen helped me develop, to relate to my teammates. You can talk about any aspect of my journey, and it's helped me out."
Any aspect and every aspect. Not just half.
Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report.
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