Baker Mayfield is a lightning rod for praise and criticism because of how outspoken he is off the field and how loud his playing style is on it. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are steamrolling folks and winning game after game while lighting up the scoreboard with points, Mayfield is bound to get overpraised as the second coming.
But when the Bucs are sliding a bit and not winning the big games, it's all going to fall on the loudest and most visible man in the room, and even by the standard of most quarterbacks getting overpraised and overcriticized in the NFL, Mayfield tends to bear the brunt of the critics a lot more easily.
He didn't bring his best stuff to the table against the Buffalo Bills. That much is clear. Reigning NFL MVP Josh Allen proved quite strongly that there is a significant margin between himself and Mayfield, reminding some of those overzealous fans earlier in the season that there are levels to this game, and that Mayfield isn't quite on his same plane.
The problem goes above Baker Mayfield
But that also doesn't mean Mayfield is the problem for the Bucs or the reason why the Bucs can't get over the hump and back to the Super Bowl. Actually, the biggest impediment to the Buccaneers success is a quieter individual who should have just as high of a profile and should have to answer to the critics after losses even more.
That would be head coach Todd Bowles. Throughout his entire career, Bowles has earned a pretty fair reputation for being a calm, dependable coach who is a great defensive coordinator but has never been able to take that next step as a consistently winning head coach, often buoyed by the more charismatic and innovative support staff around him.
After watching Bowles's own defense get completely shredded up by Allen and the Bills this weekend while he frustratingly, conservatively punted the ball out of Mayfield's hands and into Allen's with just two yards to go, the reality is starting to settle in for Buccaneers fans that if there is a ceiling the Bucs can't quite get over the hump of, then it is one imposed by Bowles - and not Mayfield.
While Mayfield may be closer to the lower border of quarterbacks who can meet the threshold of leading a team to a Super Bowl, Bowles looks comfortably below it. He's not able to overrule Josh Grizzard offensively, his leadership and approach are too plain, and his calling card of the defense is nonexistent, with fans rightfully enraged at decisions like taking out one of his best players, cornerback Jamel Dean.
Outside of his first season with the New York Jets in 2015 when Chan Gailey and Ryan Fitzpatrick put together a historic offensive season, Todd Bowles has never won 60 percent of his games as a head coach in the NFL. He was consistently a losing coach in New York before they mercifully fired him, and in Tampa Bay, he's been the definition of mediocrity with a Jeff Fisherian 8-9, 9-8, and 10-7 record. Now sliding down to 6-4, the Bucs are regressing to Bowles's mean, and that needs to be a much bigger conversation nationally than any "build him up to tear him down" pivot takes on the Baker.