Walk-on Heisman winner hit rock bottom

By Riley Gonzalez –

After winning the Heisman Trophy as a college team walk-on, after being first overall NFL draft, Baker Mayfield bottomed out. He wasn’t winning, his finances were bad and his marriage was struggling. A newspaper headlined: “Heisman has-been.”

“I had to hit rock bottom,” he said.

A fellow football player invited him to a Christian Pro Athletes Outreach retreat, and he realized what was missing from his life.

“This is what we’ve been looking for,” Baker said. “There was a lot of emptiness. I had been searching through ups and downs. I had thought I could fulfill it in other ways. But my identity at the time was a football player, a quarterback. God taught me a lesson. He had to take take my career down to the studs and make me realize that I’m more than a football player.”

Growing up in Austin Texas, Baker’s family wasn’t the type to spend every Sunday in church. “We were more of the family that went on Easter Sunday or a Christmas service, maybe two times a year,” Baker said.
When he visited his grandparents, they took him to a Baptist church every Sunday, but still he didn’t feel any faith.

In high school, Baker noticed the Fellowship of Christian Athletes was starting to grow at his school. But to him, it seemed simple: “From my perspective, I thought it was you do good deeds, you’re a good person, that means you’re a Christian.”

In college he started to face real problems. He wasn’t sure who he was apart from football. That’s when a friend introduced him to Pastor Adam Starling in Norman, Oklahoma.

“He changed my perspective,” Baker said. “He told me I didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t have to have it all figured out, that we’re all born sinners and we’ve been saved.”

Still, faith didn’t come instantly. “That’s not to say that I dove into it right away, because I didn’t,” he admitted. “It was scary for me at that time.”

When Baker entered the NFL, God placed more people in his life who would push him deeper. Drew and Kristen Stanton, both strong mentors in the league, invited Baker and his wife Emily to a Pro Athletes Outreach, also known as PAO conference. “They were the first couple that said, ‘Come to PAO. We’re going to sponsor you. Just make sure you get there.’”

The two went in February 2020, only months after they had gotten married. “We realized this is what we’d been looking for,” Baker said. “There was a lot of emptiness I had been searching to fill in other ways, and I couldn’t.”

But even as his faith grew, Baker still wrestled with identity. Football was everything to him. “My identity at the time was a football player I thought I could carry that I walked on, I did this, I did that,’” he said.
God, however, had another plan. “Fast forward a couple years into my NFL career God had to take my career down to the studs and make me realize that I’m more than a football player.”

The struggles didn’t stop with the game. His marriage with Emily was hurting. They were trying to start a family, but nothing was working. “We weren’t doing well at all at this time,” Baker admitted. “And I was hiding a lot behind closed doors.”

Those moments forced him to be honest with himself. “There’s that 99% of you that you can put on a façade as a guy. You put on the mask. But behind closed doors, who are you really? Until my career got stripped down, I was hiding a lot.”

The breakthrough came when Baker finally surrendered. “For me to climb back up, I had to dive into the Word and accept grace,” he said. “That was something really hard for me, but when I eventually did, I started to see things from a different viewpoint. That was the biggest change in my life.”

Even now, he doesn’t pretend it’s easy. “It’s not like you just get baptized and you’re saved. You have to continue to work, because the enemy is out to get you,” he said. “This has to be part of the daily routine.”

Looking back, Baker says all of it, the wins, the losses, the struggles was part of God’s plan. “It’s been a journey, but it all happened for a reason. God’s timing was perfect,” he said. “Tampa feels like home for me now, but that’s because of what Emily and I built our foundation on and that’s our faith.”

Baker has played for the Cleveland Browns, then as a backup quarterback for the Panthers and the Rams, before now being QB at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.