Ever since their return to the NFL in 1999, the Cleveland Browns have been viewed as everything from dysfunctional to delusional. That hit a peak last season when Hue Jackson and his band of merry men sunk the franchise to a 0-16 record. Partly by design – while they weren’t tanking in order to get high draft picks they weren’t not tanking – the Browns had hit rock bottom. Now things are trending up, much of it thanks to Baker Mayfield. In just two months the No1 overall pick has injected the Browns fanbase with the most dangerous thing in sports: hope.

The team has been through plenty of false dawns before, of course, the most recent of which was when Johnny Manziel looked half-decent for around 10 minutes of his rookie season. But this isn’t false: Mayfield is a bundle of passion and excellence, and has galvanized the organization and its fanbase in the same way he did while in college. In 12 games, Mayfield has tossed 21 touchdowns to 11 interceptions, almost the same TD-INT ratio as Ben Roethlisberger this season. He is already the franchise’s best quarterback since their homecoming, unless you have an inexplicable fondness for the Josh McCown era or Brian Hoyer’s 13-game tilt. Mayfield isn’t just the face of the Browns, either: he is the face of Cleveland after LeBron James, the city’s favourite son, scarpered to Los Angeles last summer.

Comparisons to Johnny Manziel are, and always were, foolish. The pair were a couple of undersized, mouthy Texans, and both had rap sheets. But Manziel was the child star who came from oil money. Things came easily to him: he was a scratch golfer; he attended football practices in jeans if he practiced at all. By contrast, Mayfield has worked for everything. He walked on twice in college, beating out blue-chip recruits at Texas Tech and Oklahoma to claim the starting job. High school analysts thought there were 159 players in Texas better than Mayfield, and more than 1,000 across the country in his 2013 recruiting class. He is the only three-star prospect in the past 15 years to win the Heisman and be selected first overall in the NFL draft.

Hue Jackson forced Mayfield to wait his turn, too, opting to open the season with Tyrod Taylor as his starting quarterback. When Taylor went down against the Jets, everything changed. Rarely has the impact of the quarterback been as evident as when Mayfield rallied his team from 14 points down to end their 19-game winless streak.

The team really changed, though, when general manager John Dorsey finally hit the ejector seat on the Hue Jackson-Todd Haley experience. Installing Greg Williams as the interim coach and Freddie Kitchens as offensive coordinator transformed the team’s culture and its offense. With Haley, Mayfield threw eight touchdowns to six interceptions, completed 58.3% of his passes, averaged 6.6 yards per attempt, and had a passer rating of 78.9. He’s been a different player with Kitchens: tossing 13 touchdowns to five picks, averaging over nine yards per attempt, completing 73% of his throws, with a passer rating of 114.4 – a number good for third in the league in that time. By installing a batch of plays Mayfield ran in college, and scheming up some easier throws (thanks to an uptick in play action), Kitchens has helped Mayfield establish an early rhythm before letting his star quarterback do star quarterback things.

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Mayfield has that special ability to conjure moments of magic and to find space where it feels like there isn’t any. He can sling fire from every conceivable release point or platform he likes. The wackier the throw, the more the entertainer relishes it. That knack for painting outside the numbers allows him to steal a split-second on the defense. That’s no small thing: the ball arrives a beat before they’re expecting it.

When it comes to off-platform throwers, Mayfield is in a rare class: Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson, Patrick Mahomes, Carson Wentz and Matthew Stafford. They’re all guys who can make unique throws no matter how their body contorts or the angle they have to deliver it at.

JzoSports (@JzoSports) That throw by Baker Mayfield. My goodness

(via @thecheckdown pic.twitter.com/2L6gp3UyKx

But, importantly, the Browns aren’t a one-man team. Their defense is downright frisky (as well as very fast) the 10th best in the league by DVOA. There is excellent talent at every level and Myles Garrett is the cream of the crop. He has developed into everything the team hoped when they selected the pass-rusher first overall in 2017. Picks that had to be a success – Mayfield, Garrett – have been.

Few teams in the league have a brighter future. Murmurs that hot-shot college coach Lincoln Riley could abscond from Oklahoma to join his former pupil Mayfield in Ohio won’t go away. It’s become a reasonable thought that a top coaching candidate should pass up the history and tradition of the Green Bay Packers and the chance to coach one of the greatest quarterbacks any of us have ever seen, in his prime, for a chance to be Cleveland’s leader.

The Browns offer a chance to build something special. The greatest market inefficiency in professional sports is a franchise quarterback on a rookie contract. Getting a 12-karat player for the price of 12 carrots in a salary capped sport is almost unfair. As the number overall pick, Mayfield is set to make good money. But it’s nothing compared to what he would command on the open market. It may be the most valuable contract in football right now.

Factor in the youth revolution that started under the Sashi Brown-Paul DePodesta brain trust, and has continued under Dorsey, and you get a cost-effective roster with all the draft capital and free-agent dollars in the world to sprinkle some tasty cherries on top. Clinch a playoff berth next season and they’ll probably give the head coach a statue. With Mayfield and this young core, that should be the minimum expectation.