Baker Mayfield’s numbers dropped off last season – his third as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ starting quarterback. Turns out there was a reason nobody really talked about.
The quarterback revealed he played through a sprained MCL and PCL (the ligaments on the inner and back part of the knee) starting in Week 2, according to the upcoming third season of Netflix’s “Quarterback” docuseries. Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times first surfaced the details. The new season premieres July 14.
Here’s the thing – the NFL’s injury reports barely mentioned it.
“Knee” only shows up four times across ten weeks where Mayfield’s name appeared on the Buccaneers’ injury report – Weeks 5, 8, 10 and 18, to be exact. Mike Florio over at Pro Football Talk pointed that out. Whatever was going on with that knee, it wasn’t showing up consistently on paper the way you’d expect from a sprain that supposedly started in September.
The rest of what did show up? Biceps. Oblique. Shoulder. A bit of illness mixed in too. Just not much knee, despite what Mayfield’s now claiming.
His teammate actually hinted at this months before the documentary dropped. Linebacker Lavonte David brought it up back in April on “The Arena” podcast, during the show’s April 6 episode.
“Man, Baker was going through a lot, bro,” David said. “Baker had a lot of injuries that you didn’t expect a quarterback to play through. You know what I’m saying? He had the oblique injury, he had the shoulder injury, he had a lot of things. You know, ankle injury, knee injury. … He was really trying to push through and really trying to be the player that we needed him to be.”
The numbers tell their own story
Mayfield threw for 4,500 yards and 41 touchdowns on a 71.4% completion rate during the 2025-26 campaign. That followed a 2024 season where he put up 4,044 yards and 28 touchdowns. Solid stuff, trending the right direction.
Then last season happened.
His production fell to 3,693 yards, just 26 touchdowns, and his completion percentage dropped to 63.2%. He topped 300 passing yards in a game only twice all season. Seven times, he didn’t even crack 200.
That kind of decline doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s probably not a coincidence that Mayfield still doesn’t have a new deal in place. He’s entering the final year of the three-year, nearly $40 million extension he signed back in 2024 – and so far, Tampa Bay hasn’t shown urgency to extend him further.
Training camp opens July 24 for the Buccaneers.
Which raises an obvious question: does Tampa Bay actually know what it’s got here? If Mayfield really was playing hurt for most of the season and it wasn’t reflected on injury reports, that’s either a communication issue between player and team, or Mayfield wasn’t fully forthcoming about how bad things were. Either way, before committing real money to a new contract, the front office is going to want a clearer picture of his health than what showed up on paper last year.