They are two young men bonded for life by 12 months and a hunk of hardware. Quarterbacks Lamar Jackson and Baker Mayfield, the winners of the Heisman Trophy in 2016 and 2017 respectively, were expected to go somewhere near the middle of Thursday night’s NFL draft. For different reasons, each carried the label of being one of the best quarterbacks in the draft, just not the best.

Then something strange happened. They went opposite ways. Mayfield was the surprise No1 overall choice by the Cleveland Browns and Jackson tumbled, grabbed with the first-round’s last pick by Baltimore at No32. While Mayfield, who chose not to attend the draft, sat at home and waited no more than 10 minutes to be chosen, Jackson sat all but alone for four hours in the draft’s green room.

Sometimes things make little sense. Few figured Mayfield, a walk-on at Texas Tech and then at Oklahoma, would be the draft’s top choice, but few expected Jackson, the Louisville star, to fall anywhere near as far as he did. And watching Jackson walking onto the stage in a half-empty AT&T Stadium, shaking his head, seemingly befuddled by the slight of a whole league passing on him, you had to wonder if the teams got it right.

Mayfield “won” draft night but Jackson may go on to have the better career. “They’re going to get a Super Bowl out of me,” Jackson told the NFL Network when asked about beng picked by the Ravens.

Picking Mayfield first overall was a tremendous gamble for the Browns who probably could have taken him with their second first-round choice, just three selections later. He is a great story, the player wanted only by Washington State and Florida Atlantic coming out of high school, who bet heavily on himself at Texas Tech and then Oklahoma. But he’s also barely 6ft tall, has oozed a lack of respect for opponents, and is a year removed from an arrest for public intoxication.

He glows with self-confidence and comes to the NFL with three years of gaudy statistics at Oklahoma but he’s hardly the dead cert the Browns crave. He will be asked to save a team that has won four games in the past three years, a franchise so miserable that it lost all 16 games last season. Mayfield’s brashness might be perfect for a team that has done nothing for too long and yet it also could be a foolish risk – another disaster for an organization that can’t get anything right.

Mayfield will be expected to win right away in Cleveland. Jackson won’t have to in Baltimore. He comes to the Ravens, who have the luxury of a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, Joe Flacco, under guaranteed contract for one more season. He can sit behind Flacco and Robert Griffin III for a year without the pressure of having to be great.

In Baltimore, Jackson will work with offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg and offensive assistant Greg Roman, who have helped turn scrambling quarterbacks like Brett Favre, Michael Vick and Colin Kaepernick into stars. He can develop slowly, refining his game without worrying that every bad pass in practice is a disaster.

“Let me learn and see what I can do,” Jackson said right after he was drafted.

Still, his plummet in the draft was difficult to comprehend. Jackson is taller and faster than Mayfield, threw for 9,043 yards in three years at Louisville and ran for another 4,132. And yet much of the NFL seemed skeptical about him. Bill Polian, the legendary general manager of the Bills, Panthers and Colts, now an ESPN analyst, said weeks ago that Jackson is too short (an odd statement, given that Jackson is 6ft 3in) and not accurate enough as a passer to be a quarterback in the NFL. He suggested Jackson should be a wide receiver instead.

Polian’s words were simply an echo of what others said. Given that Jackson is African American, the rhetoric sounded a lot like the old NFL opinions of black quarterbacks – who were often labeled “great athletes” but never seen as quarterbacks. It took an African American general manager in Baltimore’s Ozzie Newsome, running his last draft, to trade up from the second-round to grab Jackson.

On a night of a lot of tough talk – one in which UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen bristled so much at falling to the No10 pick that he declared there were “nine mistakes made ahead”of him – the images of Mayfield and Jackson are the most stark. The one quarterback who may have been picked too high against the one who went too low.

In all there were five quarterbacks chosen in the first round. The chances are that only one or two of the five will have good careers. Mayfield at first overall feels like a reach, just as it seems like Jackson lingered longer than he should have. Somehow, they appear fated to be linked forever.