The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are getting flashbacks to the dark days of old, as the start of the 2026 NFL regular season has been the worst kind of nightmare. Baker Mayfield's three fumbles in the Bucs 33-27 Week 1 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals was bad enough, but then watching the Bucs lose 23-19 at home to the lowly Cleveland Browns, just one week after Liam Coen turned them into minc emeat, is an embarrassment that is simply too much to bear.
The Buccaneers barely looked like an NFL team, and after a historic franchise collapse at the end of the 2025 season in which the Bucs blew a seemingly guaranteed playoff spot, there are serious questions being asked of Mayfield.
Jason Licht and the Glazers agreed to open the pocket books just mere weeks before the start of the season when it seemed like a deadline to extend Mayfield had passed. And now, the regret is already there for many Bucs fans, who are too quickly pondering the possibilities in the upcoming NFL Draft at quarterback, with high-profile names such as Arch Manning or Dante Moore.
The grass isn't greener without Baker Mayfield for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
But the thing is, giving up on Baker Mayfield or abandoning a player after two weeks and already speculating about his replacement seems like a premature stance to take. It's also a dangerous one, because rebuilding with a flawed quarterback prospect like, say, Manning, is a recipe to be set back another several years.
There is also the matter that as flawed as Manning is, he's likely unachievable for the Buccaneers. Because even if Baker Mayfield is actually a fraudulent franchise quarterback, even Mayfield at his worst is still good enough to get the Bucs to a record that is respectable enough to not even be able to pick high enough to land a top quarterback prospect.
But it honestly the psychological statement that is the biggest problem. Just as quickly as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 2025 NFL season went into the gutter, by that very logic, Mayfield could just as easily turn it around this season and play like the MVP candidate he was through the first six weeks of the 2025 campaign.
Most Buccaneers fans posit that the ills of the team are to blame on Todd Bowles, a coach so dreadful that he somehow got a losing season out of Tom Brady, who never had that hapepn to him in his caerer.
And if Bowles can do that to Tom Brady, then Mayfield's struggles aren't so hard to understand. Mayfield already has a contract and isn't going away now. The time to have decided against him was weeks ago when the deal was struck; now, the best thing to do is to throw their full support at the quarterback.
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