We’ve successfully completed our tumble through the NFL looking glass and arrived safely at a place where Baker Mayfield is no longer immature or limited, no longer ill-sized or an acquired taste and is merely underpaid. Saying as much is no longer fanaticism; it’s simply fact. The quality of quarterbacking Tampa Bay is getting right now from a player who is making less money than Kirk Cousins, Sam Darnold, Geno Smith or—dry cough—Deshaun Watson remains one of the great (soon to be corrected) financial victories of our time. For his team, at least.
After watching Mayfield rumble over the 49ers, certainly an outfit that has injury issues of its own and saw how difficult a game plan can be when Mac Jones cools down to a normal human temperature and isn’t completing theatrical, blindfold-style out routes (Jones went from a 17.5 EPA against the Rams in a stunning victory last week to a negative-five thanks to San Francisco’s offensive line also folding, plus the 49ers lost all-world linebacker Fred Warner in this game to a dislocated ankle), I think it’s time we make the proper overcorrection on Mayfield that has been so long in the making.
Mayfield shouldn’t gain quiet acceptance into the cozy pantheon of top-10 quarterbacks. Rather, he needs to be considered the runaway favorite for the NFL MVP this season. While those awards aren’t handed out due to pre-Halloween performances alone, Tampa Bay has shown a promise to be relevant enough for Mayfield’s campaign to retain its zeal into late December.
Not that we needed another prove-it game from Mayfield, who did it without Dave Canales, and who did it without Liam Cohen, making him a more certain NFL head coach pipeliner than overlapping with Kyle Shanahan or Sean McVay on their staffs, charitable boards or collegiate slam poetry clubs. He’s playing some of his best football that we’ve seen without Chris Godwin, Mike Evans, Emeka Egbuka or Bucky Irving. While the gravity of stalwart quarterbacks who perpetually sit atop this award leaderboard might be stronger, Mayfield’s singular energy source is propelling arguably the second- or third-best team in football right now.
I’m sure you’ve seen it already, the third-and-14 with Tampa ahead by a point. Mayfield bulling through two sacks, escaping the pocket, pump-faking, stiff-arming a third 49ers defender before plowing into a fourth and reaching over the marker for a first down. But, to me, it’s the context of that throw which matters the most.
PURE BAKER MAYFIELD 😡
— Tampa Bay Buccaneers (@Buccaneers) October 12, 2025
📺: #SFvsTB on CBS pic.twitter.com/K828xrTkBD
Mayfield was absolutely leveled by a secondary blitz before the half on a touchdown pass to Kameron Johnson (which, miraculously, did not count in the official game log as a quarterback hit). He threw his other score stepping up into a pocket the size of a New York City apartment closet and uncorked it from behind the 50-yard line. Perhaps because of his past and the necessity he felt in grinding out the ugliest of plays to simply keep a starting job, that dirty work is almost consistently evident, and Mayfield has the highest EPA on scrambles in the NFL. He went into this game as one of the most pressured quarterbacks in the NFL, which, if you remove both Bengals quarterbacks and Russell Wilson (who seems to attract pressure like a bug-starved headlight), he remains at the very top of a very short list of quarterbacks who are incredibly successful despite a growing list of what we might call circumstances.
Every quarterback has circumstances, and even though Mayfield does have an incredibly deep roster of backups who would likely be starters elsewhere, it is his continued mastery of such circumstances that creates a more nebulous, but potentially stronger MVP candidacy.
There is an impossible-to-quantify value of having someone who has been trashed and shoved through the NFL sausage grinder as publicly as Mayfield was, and yet still managed to improve. The Sam Darnold comparison is certainly apt, but with Mayfield and with the Buccaneers, there is less attention paid to Mayfield still learning to throw deeper more often, to take fewer sacks despite a still-high volume of pressure, or to get rid of the ball with more decisiveness and efficiency.
Being a part of that in real time has changed the way Tampa Bay operates schematically and operationally.
Listen, we make strange, narrative-based choices for MVP all the time. Last year, Lamar Jackson was a superior player to Josh Allen, but it was time to give the award to Allen, and Jackson had won it the year before. I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who, if taking their voting choice through a legitimate Socratic dialogue, wouldn’t have arrived at the realization that, yes, having Jackson with multiple MVP awards already and Allen with none, and having both quarterbacks perform at a similar statistical pace, made it easier to hand the trophy to one person.
Fair enough. But now it’s time for Mayfield, who never got the flower crown for the player he developed into—hell, he barely got the contract—to earn that same kind of benefit. We can go from viewing him as a perpetual curiosity to an MVP candidate, so long as we’re willing to do what so many teams in his past did not: remove all pretenses and allow ourselves to be blown away by what we’re seeing.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Baker Mayfield Is a Real MVP Candidate, Not Just a Perpetual Curiosity.
