Baker Mayfield has had a... uh... turbulent career we'll say in this league. I've always been a fan of the guy, ever since his Oklahoma days. But I was curious; how well does Baker perform in cities that have a larger amount of bakeries? So I decided to analyze his performance in every NFL city to determine if there's a relationship between the two.

Methodology: Finding a consistent measurement of bakeries in individual cities is incredibly difficult, and with different regional chains, I needed some universal bakery in order to figure out how well Baker performed. To that end, I ended up utilizing Panera Bread; it's by far the nation's largest chain bakery, and it has over 2000 locations, being quite evenly spread out across the nation. In order to find the number of Panera Breads in a city, I settled on strictly using city limits to define whether or not a Panera was "in the city" or not. For the selected city, I chose the city the team is most closely associated with. This means that, for example, the Jets and Giants both are counted for the New York City city boundaries, not the East-Rutherford city boundaries.

As for measuring Baker's performance, I simply used passer rating, as it's the best general evaluator of a QB's play in one stat. I took Baker's passer ratings in games in each NFL city, and averaged them out for each city to get a singular figure for each. You'll notice on this graph that many NFL teams are excluded, and that's because Baker has not played a game in the following NFL cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Philidelphia, Washington DC, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, and Miami. For every other NFL city, including Oakland as Baker played 1 game there, I plotted each city's number of Panera Breads vs. Baker's average passer rating in said cities.

Findings:

Baker plays statistically significantly better in cities with more bakeries. In Nashville, with 9 Panera Breads in city limits, Baker has an average passer rating of 147, while in San Francisco, with no Panera Breads, Baker's passer average passer rating is an abysmal 13.4. Baker's performance relative to bakeries in a city had a correlation coefficient, or r value, of .443, which is a moderate positive relationship. Baker bakes with bakeries.

Graphs / Data: