Tampa Bay Buccaneers' One Big Question: Can Baker Mayfield Lead Them to the Promised Land? originally appeared on Athlon Sports.
In this offseason series, Athlon Sports' Doug Farrar asks the One Big Question for every NFL team that will become readily apparent when the season does begin, and the lights are at their brightest. We continue with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, whose playoff issues over the last four seasons have eclipsed the good work that general manager Jason Licht and head coach Todd Bowles have done. Now, it's on Baker Mayfield to make the most of his considerable gifts, and take these Bucs to the proverbial Promised Land.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have won two Super Bowls in their history, in decidedly different ways.
The 2002 Bucs beat the daylights out of the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII with one of the best defenses in pro football history, and a journeyman quarterback in Brad Johnson. Johnson's status didn't matter, because the defense was utterly ridiculous all the way through the season — in fact, in that 48-21 thrashing, the Bucs scored as many defensive touchdowns (three) as the Raiders did overall.
It didn't hurt that head coach Jon Gruden knew every step of the Raiders' offense from his time creating it before Oakland traded him before that season.
Then, the 2020 Bucs did their thing primarily with the auspices of one Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, who started his amazing run with his second NFL team that season. Yes, the defense killed any opportunity for Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs in a 31-9 Super Bowl LV show, but the story was really how well the combination of Brady and Bruce Arians eventually worked.
Brady had two more great seasons in 2021 and 2022 before his retirement, and the team lucked out in the post-Brady era with the 2023 acquisition of Baker Mayfield, the 2018 first overall pick of the Cleveland Browns. Mayfield was starting to look like a guy whose on-field exploits couldn't match the draft capital given up for him. Mayfield was jettisoned by the Browns in a 2022 trade to the Carolina Panthers, he had bit parts with the Panthers and the Los Angeles Rams, and he then signed a one-year, $4 million deal with the Bucs in 2023.
The result was Mayfield's best NFL season to date under offensive coordinator Dave Canales, who parlayed that improvement into his current gig as the Panthers' head coach. Mayfield parlayed it into a new three-year, $100 million deal with $40 million guaranteed.
Now, Mayfield was the franchise quarterback, and there was no doubt about it. He lived up to the designation in 2024 with a season in which he completed 422 of 588 passes for 4,685 yards, 43 touchdowns, 16 interceptions, and a passer rating of 108.1. Mayfield made his second straight Pro Bowl under new offensive coordinator Liam Coen (who parleyed that into his new gig as the Jacksonville Jaguars' head coach), and Mayfield once again had his best season to date.
If you're waiting for the "but" in this preamble, here it is. Since that second championship, these Bucs have done well... but not as well as they would have liked. They've won the NFC South in each of the four subsequent seasons, but they haven't been able to progress past the divisional round of the playoffs, and their .588 win percentage is the league's 10th-highest since 2021.
Good enough to get you in the tournament; not good enough to keep you there very long. That's what head coach Todd Bowles and general manager Jason Licht are trying to transcend.
While the defense will need to take some steps forward from the ranking of 16th in DVOA last season, moves have been made to make things better. The offense (which ranked eighth) could be special, and it all starts with Mayfield. Throughout his NFL career, and going back to his time at Oklahoma, there is a YOLO aspect to Mayfield's play that his coaches just have to put down to Rogue Gene Factor, and deal with accordingly. As impressive as Mayfield was in 2024, he also led the league in interceptions with those 16 picks.
Mayfield's ultimate confidence in his own abilities, and the abilities of his teammates, is what you want in any quarterback — but there are two sides to that coin. If you are convinced that you can make any throw at any time, it's not always going to work, no matter who you are. Mayfield will throw late downfield at times, he will make throws in the grasp when he should live to fight another day, and while he's capable of reading any coverage out through the timing of the down, it doesn't always show up on the field.
New offensive coordinator Josh Grizzard, who spent the 2024 season as Coen's passing game coordinator and worked with Mike McDaniel and the Miami Dolphins before that, is the next man up when it comes to managing the good and bad of Baker Mayfield.
"It means the world to me," Grizzard said in April of Mayfield's endorsement of his promotion. "Without knowing him going into this time last year when I was brought on [and now], he was one of the first people to FaceTime me when I got the job. I know I have the support of him. I was in every meeting with him last year, whether it was gameplan meetings, on the field, going through individual [work] with [quarterbacks coach] Thad [Lewis], Liam [Coen] and [pass game specialist] Jordan [Somerville]. So, to take our relationship to the next level and be able to lean on him and him take that next step as a leader [is huge after] being in the league this long. Now, he can shoulder more of the burden to elevate the younger guys and coach the younger guys. That way, he is another extension of the coaching staff on the field. He has been fantastic. You know he is a competitor, and we're looking forward to it." .
And to be fair, the good of Mayfield far outweighs the bad. The Buccaneers' 2024 season ended in the wild-card round against the Washington Commanders when Washington kicker Zane Gonzalez booted a 37-yard game-winning field goal as time expired in a 23-20 nailbiter. The difference in that game was the fact that Dan Quinn's Commanders went for it over and over on fourth down and succeeded for the most part, while Bowles' Buccaneers did not. This was not a Baker Mayfield problem.
Really, Mayfield is good at just about everything required of a modern professional quarterback. His metrics last season bear that out.
When pressured: 58 of 96 for 669 yards, five touchdowns, three interceptions, and a passer rating of 85.8.
When blitzed: 141 of 191 for 1,643 yards, 18 touchdowns, four interceptions, and a passer rating of 122.1.
When throwing outside the pocket: 39 of 53 for 489 yards, six touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 131.7.
With pre-snap motion: 233 of 310 for 2,550 yards, 26 touchdowns, eight interceptions, and a passer rating of 116.2.
On throws of 20 or more air yards: 20 of 52 for 583 yards, seven touchdowns, four interceptions, and a passer rating of 88.4.
Just as Canales managed Mayfield and helped him to a new level of efficiency in 2023, Coen unleashed things schematically in 2024 that allowed Mayfield to be the explosive captain he was destined to be. This is what Grizzard has to maintain — it helps, of course, that he has already has a year with the playbook.
Now, Mayfield and Grizzard are working on striking the perfect balance between big plays and consistency.
"We're trying to get some more explosive [plays] in," Mayfield said after minicamp practice on June 10. "Obviously, when you look at the stats — I'm not a big stats guy, but we weren't as much down-the-field explosive. We were creating a lot of openings in the middle, and guys getting some YAC."
It's true that Mayfield didn't hurl the ball deep that often in a comparative sense last season. Josh Allen led the NFL with 87 attempts of 20 or more air yards in 2024, nearly twice as many as Mayfield had. That also has to do with a new level of reading and reacting to defenses, which Mayfield is also taking on.
"[We're] working on that, being able to connect on the chemistry we're trying to build right now and just the timing of some of these routes – where the landmarks are and understanding that if it's two-high [safety coverage], one-high [safety coverage], where we're trying to throw the ball," Mayfield concluded. "This is the time of year we're working on it. Obviously, you would love to have more down-the-field shots, but any completion is a good one."
If it all comes together for Mayfield in 2025, and he's able to keep the good parts of the daredevil mentality while reducing the negative effects, he has the potential to move into the pantheon of the NFL's best at his position. And at that point, who's to say just how far these Buccaneers can go?
