The NFL has rarely agreed that the best player in college football will also be the best pro. But for just the third time in 20 years, an NFL team has taken the reigning Heisman Trophy winner with the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. Concern over another Heisman bust will hover over Baker Mayfield’s first few seasons in Cleveland, but he’s been beating the odds his whole career.

Despite being a few inches shorter than you’d like a quarterback to be, he spent three years at Oklahoma and one at Texas Tech torching Big 12 defenses. And when he went against defenses littered with NFL talent, he (usually) went ahead and torched them, too.

Despite not being all that fast, he was slippery enough to evade college defenders in a way that made you stand up your living room, arms skyward, whenever he made a daring escape from a collapsing pocket. He forced you to suppress your fleeting fury with him for not just throwing the ball away — by virtue of the fact that it was now, somehow, 40 yards closer to the end zone.

The former three-star prospect, who turned down offers to join Texas Tech in 2013 as a walk-on, kept track of every critical word ever printed about him and used it as fuel to power him to one of the most prolific careers in college football history. If you celebrated too much after beating him one year, he’d repay you in kind the next.

His obsessiveness over proving critics wrong walked along a knife’s edge between inspiration and insanity. I lost track of the number of times Oklahoma made him issue apologies for his public behavior — apologies that always felt like they were delivered through gritted teeth.

He was intense. He was messy. He was brilliant. He was stupid. But above all, he was fun.

In short, Baker Mayfield was the quintessential college football player. And in his four combined years at Texas Tech and Oklahoma, he showcased many of the qualities that we’ve been conditioned to believe wouldn’t translate to the NFL. Years ago I resigned myself to the assumption that college would be the end of the road for Mayfield. So I was surprised and excited when it started to become apparent that NFL scouts thought he was cool, too. And the fact that they think he's No. 1 overall pick cool still feels like a dream.

But the NFL has a track record of taking square pegs like Mayfield and forcing them through its round hole, losing the bits of their personality that made us love them along the way. Of course, sometimes it just breaks them altogether. (Could a few years of growing pains turn the haterade Mayfield subsists on into poison?) And the Browns have of a history of … well, do I really need to show you yet another picture of the jersey with all the failed Cleveland quarterbacks tacked on?

It’s hard for us to let our college football children leave the nest. Especially when we’re sending them off to the Browns. I’d like to think that if we time-traveled to 2028, we’d be greeted by a world full people who, because of all of the fun things Baker and the boys have been doing during their deep playoff runs, barely remember an era when Cleveland were considered a cursed franchise.

But it’s the No Fun League we’re talking about. And it’s the Browns. So I worry.

College football would gladly keep Baker Mayfield for a few more years, but the rules say he belongs to you now, NFL. Please, please, please take care of him.