Coming out of the 2025 NFL season, it seems like everyone outside of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers bubble wants to put all the pressure on Baker Mayfield. And look, it makes a ton of sense. Mayfield is the quarterback, he is an easy target with his personality, he has a lot of expectations on him, he has a lot of great players around him, and he was being hyped up as an MVP candidate throughout the first half of the season before the awful Bucs collapse.
But while Mayfield himself will be one of the first, in his spirit of accountability, to admit that he played quite poorly down the stretch of the regular season, every single Buccaneers fan knows that it's not quite so simple. Mayfield had to deal with a lot of injuries both to himself and the stars around him, but, above all else, he was held back by a defense that was nowhere near playoff worthy- and they eventually proved it.
Buccaneers safety Antoine Winfield Jr. was a mainstay of the Bucs defense for years and one of the top safeties in the NFL, and although he earned Pro Bowl honors for the second time in his career last season, even the Buccaneers faithful who love Winfield and rate him highly don't feel that his play in the 2025 season merited any honors.
Antoine Winfield Jr. is pivotal to the Bucs' success
Winfield was mediocre in coverage, uncharacterstically sloppy in run support, and set the tone in a negative way as a leader. He didn't pull this defense up and set a poor example, by which the rest of his teammates followed.
In truth, Winfield's play these last two seasons has been a far cry from 2023 when he set the league ablaze with all around, high flying play in the defensive backfield. He was a First Team All-Pro player and a Defensive Player of the Year candidate. But now, Winfield has not even be an average safety for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which is a massive fall off.
That fall off counts in the box score. After the Buccaneers added a few key veterans to fill the squad depth and landed a blue chip edge rushing prospect in Rueben Bain Jr. as well as Josiah Trotter and Keionte Scott to fill out the defense with two more starters on draft day, more will be shouldered by Antoine Winfield Jr. as a leader on defense without Lavonte David. And if he lives up to what he showed in 2023, he is the missing piece. If not, the Buccaneers defense could still be the thing that holds them back; that's the difference Winfield being elite vs. being mediocre makes.
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