New Panthers quarterback Baker Mayfield will be playing for an offensive coordinator in Carolina who didn’t think much of him when he was entering the draft.
Panthers offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo was out of coaching in 2018, but he still scouted that year’s quarterback class and offered his own assessments of the prospects. And McAdoo was not high on Mayfield.
McAdoo told the New York Post that while he liked Mayfield personally, he thought Mayfield had major drawbacks, including his height, his athleticism, his hand size, and the offense he played in at Oklahoma.
“I didn’t see a lot of pro-style football in his college tape,” McAdoo said. “And if you’re short you have to be able to make up for it some way, somehow, and personality doesn’t do that. I didn’t think he was a great athlete. This guy is kinda like a pocket quarterback that is short and with small hands, that’s what I worry about.”
Although Mayfield went first overall in the 2018 NFL draft, McAdoo ranked him as the sixth-best quarterback prospect, behind Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen and Mason Rudolph.
McAdoo deserves credit for getting the first two right: Allen and Jackson did prove to be the top two quarterbacks in the 2018 NFL draft, and few people other than McAdoo saw that coming. But what will get all the attention now is that McAdoo thought Mayfield was a mediocre prospect -- and a worse prospect than Darnold, who will now compete with Mayfield for the starting job in Carolina.
Mayfield is surely well aware of how McAdoo felt, and the two of them may have to smooth things over.