Two No. 1 overall picks, one opener: Burrow versus Mayfield in Cincinnati

Every NFL draft produces exactly one player picked first overall, and every team that holds that pick is, by definition, coming off one of the worst seasons in the league. The system exists to help bad teams get good fastest: finish last, pick first, hope the quarterback you take turns the whole thing around. Most years, that gamble produces one story. This year, at Paycor Stadium, it produces two at once.

On Sunday, Baker Mayfield and Joe Burrow will start against each other in a season opener for the first time. According to Bengals.com, it is the first time in Paycor Stadium's 27 seasons that an Opening Day game there has featured two starting quarterbacks who were each picked first overall in their draft: Mayfield by the Cleveland Browns in 2018, Burrow by the Cincinnati Bengals in 2020.

What a No. 1 overall pick actually means

For a reader who did not grow up with the NFL draft, the mechanism is simple. Every college prospect eligible for the draft is available to be selected once, in order, over seven rounds. The team with the league's worst record the previous season picks first. There is no transfer fee, no bidding war, just the right to sign that player to his first professional contract on rookie-scale terms.

Being picked first overall is the highest ceiling and, historically, one of the widest ranges of outcomes in professional sports. Some No. 1 picks become franchise cornerstones for a decade. Others become the answer to a trivia question about players who never started a full season. What makes Sunday notable is not that a No. 1 pick is playing, that happens most weeks, but that two of them, drafted two years apart by different teams, are starting against each other in the first game of the year.

Burrow on Mayfield's arm

Burrow met with reporters on Wednesday, September 9, ahead of Sunday's opener, and was asked about Mayfield specifically. He said Mayfield "probably has the strongest arm in the league," adding that he can "laser some in there," a remark reported by Bengals.com and echoed across other outlets covering the press conference.

It is a small moment, one quarterback complimenting another before a game neither treats as personal, but it says something about how the league has come to view Mayfield seven years after Cleveland drafted him. The version of Mayfield that struggled to hold a starting job in 2022 is not the version other starting quarterbacks are describing out loud in September 2026.

The head-to-head record

Burrow and Mayfield have shared a field before, though not since Mayfield wore a Bucs uniform. All three of their previous meetings as starters came while Mayfield was with Cleveland, in 2020 and 2021, and Cleveland won every one of them.

The two home losses, in 2020 and 2021, are the pair Bengals.com references when it calls Sunday part of Burrow's ongoing history against No. 1 overall quarterbacks at his home stadium. The 2022 meeting was different in kind. By then Mayfield had been traded to Carolina, and he only entered that November game after halftime in relief of starter P.J. Walker, with the Panthers already trailing badly. He threw two touchdown passes in relief, but the Bengals had already built a 35-0 lead behind five Joe Mixon touchdowns and cruised to a 42-21 win. It was a Burrow win on the scoreboard, but not really a Burrow-Mayfield duel in the way Sunday will be.

Two very different roads to the same Sunday

What makes this opener resonate beyond the trivia is how differently the two men got here. Burrow's path has been the more linear one on paper and the more physically brutal one in practice. He led Cincinnati to Super Bowl LVI after the 2021 season, a run that ended in a 23-20 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in February 2022. Two seasons later, a torn ligament in his throwing wrist in Week 11 of 2023 ended his season early, one entry in an injury list that also includes the torn ACL, MCL and other knee damage that finished his rookie year in November 2020. He came back from the wrist injury in 2024 to throw 43 touchdown passes and win his second Comeback Player of the Year award, evidence that the arm and the job have both stayed his the whole time, interruptions aside.

Mayfield's route has had no such continuity. Cleveland traded him to Carolina in July 2022. He went 1-5 as the Panthers' starter before they released him that December. The Los Angeles Rams claimed him off waivers the very next day and threw him into a game with almost no preparation. Tampa Bay signed him in March 2023, and what followed there is the reason Sunday's duel is being talked about at all: back-to-back NFC South titles, a playoff win, two Pro Bowl selections, and, as BucsWorld covered separately, a three-year, $165 million contract extension agreed to just two days before this Wednesday press conference. Four teams in five years is not usually how a quarterback career gets rebuilt. Mayfield's is the exception that made it work.

What it means for the Bucs' offense

There is a smaller, more specific thread tying this game to Tampa Bay's season, not just the two draft classes. New Bucs offensive coordinator Zac Robinson worked with Mayfield before, briefly, during those chaotic five games with the Rams in December 2022, the same stretch that started with Mayfield learning a new offense in 48 hours after the waiver claim. Robinson has said publicly he is building this year's scheme around what Mayfield does well, a very different starting point than trying to fit a quarterback into a coordinator's preferred system from scratch. Readers who want the fuller picture of that offense should see what Zac Robinson's system is actually built to do.

None of that guarantees Sunday goes Tampa Bay's way. Mayfield has won all three of their meetings as opposing starters, but Cincinnati enters the opener with a clean injury report while the Bucs are still working through late-week questions of their own on the other side of the ball. Still, the framing itself, two No. 1 overall picks who took opposite paths to get to the same opening Sunday, is a reminder of how differently a career can bend after the moment a team decides you are the answer. One of them never left the team that picked him first. The other needed three more teams before he found one that fit. Sunday, for the first time, they start against each other with both careers finally on stable ground.