Emeka Egbuka started his NFL career off with a bang in 2025. Through just five weeks, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie wide receiver had already recorded 25 catches for 445 yards and five touchdowns. He ranked fourth among all NFL wideouts at that point in receiving yards and was tied for second in touchdown grabs. He was the NFL’s Offensive Rookie of the Month for September and his exploits in that five-week span included a last-minute game-winning score in Week One at Atlanta and a massive 77-yard touchdown catch in a Week Five shootout win in Seattle.
Egbuka would go on to construct one of the most prolific debut seasons ever for a Buccaneers receiver, and he finished second among all NFL rookie wideouts in 2025 in receptions and receiving yards. As impressive as all of that was, it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, however. Egbuka was the 19th overall pick in the 2025 draft, after all, and with early-season injuries to Chris Godwin, Mike Evans and Jalen McMillan he quickly became the focal point of the Bucs’ passing attack. It was a noteworthy first season that portends a great professional career for the former Ohio State star.
Meanwhile, there was one other player who caught at least five touchdown passes for the Buccaneers in 2025, and it wasn’t any of the usual suspects. Due to limited playing time, Evans and Godwin only combined for five touchdown catches and McMillan, who scored eight times as a rookie in 2025 did not find the end zone in his injury-shortened second season.
No, the only other Buccaneer to catch five-plus touchdown passes in 2025 was another rookie receiver, Tez Johnson, and that did come as something of a surprise. Johnson was a seventh-round pick in the ’25 draft and he joined a receiving corps so deep that he was a healthy scratch in Week Two. Through the first three games of his rookie campaign he had exactly one catch for eight yards. But the same rash of ailments that thrust Egbuka into the spotlight also created opportunities for Johnson sooner than most would have imagined. While his numbers at season’s end weren’t as gaudy as Egbuka’s, Johnson was a smashing success as a rookie, contributing 28 catches for 322 yards and those five scores. It’s safe to say that seventh-round pick Tez Johnson definitely was an under-the-radar find for the Buccaneers in 2025.
That’s the kind of player that we will be discussing today. As the Buccaneers continue their transition from the end of the 2025 season to a 2026 offseason that has already brought a significant amount of change, Staff Writer/Reporter Brianna Dix, Buccaneers.com Contributor Gabriel Kahaian and I have decided to tackle a number of topics about both seasons in a series of weekly Roundtable articles between now and the start of the NFL’s new league year in March. We started with a few looks back at the 2025 campaign and our now turning our attention to a variety of topics regarding what lies ahead as the Bucs try to climb back to the top of the NFC South mountain.
Bri, Gabe and I have lined up eight topics we will be debating over the next two months, one on each Monday. Here’s the whole schedule, with links to the ones we’ve already completed:
This week, we’re looking for the player you might not see coming in 2026. Since we’re doing this well before the 2026 draft, we don’t have any rookies like Johnson to choose from, but there are still plenty of players who could be in position to surprise us with their production next season. Who are the potential under-the-radar performers who could emerge as important contributors in 2026. We’ll make a few guesses.
The three of us are choosing not to duplicate any answers, so the order in which the three of us get to provide our predictions sometimes matters. For that reason, we’re rotating the order of selection from week to week, and this time around Bri gets to start us off, followed by Gabe and then me.