Not much has gone the way of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers over the last 10 months. Between a tremendously disappointing second half of the 2025 season, key personnel departures, questions about the coaching staff's future and a contract standoff involving the team's starting quarterback, there is not much room for optimism heading into 2026. Unless you ask Baker Mayfield.
Baker Mayfield still has his sights set on a prolific year. Perhaps every blow the Buccaneers suffered and all of the noise surrounding them will fuel him to deliver just that. "I think we're going to shock a lot of people this year," Mayfield said Tuesday after practice.
"I'm excited to just get on the road and do that." Mayfield is deeply familiar with critics and regularly proves them wrong. He has done so at every stage of his football career. After finishing high school as an underrecruited prospect, Mayfield at Texas Tech became the first FBS walk-on true freshman quarterback to start a season opener.
At Oklahoma, be shined as the only former walk-on to ever win the Heisman Trophy. While some said his antics and physical shortcomings would prevent him from finding professional success, he flew off the draft board as the No. 1 overall pick in 2018 and is now a two-time Pro Bowler. The moral is to count Mayfield out at your own risk.
He seems to thrive on adversity, and he and the Buccaneers face no shortage of it ahead of the 2026 season. Everything that plagued Tampa Bay from the middle of last season onward led to widespread pessimism for their 2026 outlook. Good luck finding many pundits who foresee the Buccaneers doing anything beyond treading water in the NFL's weakest division.
"You can't avoid it," Mayfield said of the negative discourse. "There's TVs everywhere." From their Week 9 bye last season onward, the Buccaneers went just 2-7 and sustained losing streaks of three and four games. The offense regressed into being far too schematic and predictable, and the defense was not strong enough to bail it out.
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