Baker Mayfield used to keep a list. His childhood friends are convinced this started early in high school, back when he was 5 feet 5 and 120 pounds, a wannabe quarterback in a football-obsessed Texas town who had to crowhop like a center fielder just to throw it 35 yards.
His buddies ribbed him. His parents wanted him to quit. He started writing down the names of anyone who doubted or dismissed him, easy fuel for a player who came to crave conflict.
When he couldn’t find a target, he’d invent one. Once, during a 7-on-7 state championship game, Mayfield was torching an opposing cornerback so consistently that he started calling out his receivers’ routes before the snap, wanting the kid to know exactly how he was going to embarrass him.
“Here comes the post!”
“We’re running a fade! You can stop a fade, right?”
The touchdowns piled up. The corner grew so frustrated his coach yanked him off the field. Mayfield kept chirping at him.
“In all my years I’ve only had one player get a taunting penalty in 7-on-7,” says Lake Travis High School coach Hank Carter. “And Baker got several.”
This NFL player might have the most on the line in 2026
Zak Keefer
At the start of a Nike showcase event hosted by former NFL QB Trent Dilfer, Mayfield and Zach Austin, his best friend and top wideout, were lighting up a field of four- and five-star recruits. When he noticed none of the coaches were paying attention, Mayfield told Austin to pack up his cleats. They left halfway through.
Mayfield needed the slights, the targets, the edge. “Some guys get riled up and don’t play worth a sh—,” says Lincoln Riley, one of his college coaches. “Baker’s different. Baker plays his best when his blood is boiling.”
The overlooked high schooler became the cocky college star, then the fiery pro with the sharpest tongue in the league, hellbent on running toward any fight he could find. Now, on the verge of his ninth NFL season — and without a contract for his 10th — Mayfield has found his latest target: his own front office.
He was once the toast of Cleveland, the city’s unofficial heir to LeBron James; by the end of his four-year stay he was feuding with the head coach and silencing the owner’s phone calls. The Browns dumped him for a quarterback facing 22 sexual assault allegations. The Panthers demoted him to the scout team. Colin Cowherd told him to retire. The list grew longer.
“At some of the other places I’ve been, I’ve learned some things aren’t fixable,” Mayfield says. “I tried to force my own way, and anytime you make your own plan, you’re gonna have a nice surprise.”
He’d forced his own way ever since he was too short and too small to get on the field at Lake Travis. Then the starter got hurt, and Mayfield went 25-2 over the next two seasons and led the team to a state title. He walked on at Texas Tech and won Big 12 Offensive Freshman of the Year. When the coaches refused to offer him a scholarship, he bolted for Oklahoma, knowing he’d have to start from the bottom. Again.
His high school coach warned him: “Baker, they’ve got a kid there named Trevor Knight who just threw for 350 yards against Alabama and Nick Saban’s defense,” Carter said.
“I don’t care,” Baker replied. “I’m gonna win the job.”
For the first month, the Sooners staff didn’t even know he was on campus. “He just showed up one day and said, ‘Hey, can I join the football team?’” Riley remembers. Within three years he was the first walk-on in college football history to win the Heisman.
“That’s why we drafted him No. 1 in Cleveland,” says Hue Jackson, one of the many coaches Mayfield has feuded with. “You know that famous Browns jersey with all the QB names on the back? Well, Baker’s a guy who we knew wouldn’t give a s— about that.”
Mayfield broke onto the national stage as a freshman walk-on at Texas Tech in 2013 before transferring to Oklahoma the following year. (Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht met Mayfield in the spring of 2023, the lowest point of the quarterback’s career. He’d been on three teams in eight months and was looking for a fourth. The Patriots called, wanting him to sit behind Mac Jones. The Ravens called, wanting him to sit behind Lamar Jackson. Licht called and promised open competition. The offer was $8.5 million — “pennies on the dollar,” the GM says. “We’re gonna put it out to the media that you’re competing with Kyle Trask,” Licht warned.
“I don’t care,” Baker replied. “I’m gonna win the job.”
Four quarters into his Bucs’ tenure, Mayfield announced his presence. He stiff-armed Vikings cornerback Byron Murphy on a scamper to the sideline, then screamed at him, “Get your weight up, little boy!”
Licht was watching from the press box. “We might have something here,” he told himself.
The Bucs won NFC South titles in 2023 and 2024 and looked even better to start 2025. Mayfield kept throwing bombs and running his mouth. “You’re gonna be real f—ing quiet at halftime,” he told Seahawks fans before a Week 5 game in Seattle. “I f—ing told you!” he gloated after a 38-35 win over the eventual champs.
By midseason his name was in the MVP conversation. The Bucs were 6-2 and stirring talk of a Super Bowl run. “We have the team to do it,” Mayfield said then. He was so close to having everything he’s ever wanted. Maybe as close as he’ll ever get.
Then came the skid. Seven losses in eight weeks. Mayfield got hurt and played hurt, succumbing to some of his most stubborn, self-sabotaging instincts. “He would have to be dead not to play,” Licht says. “Sometimes that’s not a good thing.”
The final tally for the 2025 season: sprained MCL, sprained PCL, bruised knee, bruised bicep and sprained AC joint, evidence of a reckless style his offensive coordinator likened to a UFC fighter. Mayfield refused to miss a start, even if he was too injured to practice. His play regressed. The defense crumbled. The season fell apart.
He watched the game that sealed the Bucs’ playoff fate from his kitchen in Tampa. The Panthers won the division via tiebreaker. “We s— the bed,” he mumbled, as captured in the latest season of the Netflix series, “Quarterback.” “This is the best roster I’ve ever been on.”
The late-season slide muddied Mayfield’s future. A contract extension that once felt like a certainty became part of a more complicated conversation. Talks dragged. He set a deadline — the start of training camp — then held firm. He said he felt “disrespected” by the Bucs’ offers. He said the price was only going to go up. He said he wouldn’t negotiate until after the season.
He sounded like a player resolute on proving his own team wrong.
“Sometimes you have to back yourself into a corner and fight your way out,” he said.
Licht didn’t expect this type of acrimony with a player he says “will be a friend for life,” but he’s not naïve about the personality he’s dealing with.
“I hope he’s the quarterback as long as I’m still working,” Licht said in December, before Mayfield’s play slipped and the Bucs missed the playoffs. “I hope he’s my last quarterback.”
In Licht’s mind, nothing has changed.
Mayfield eventually scrapped his list, wanting to look forward instead of back. That doesn’t mean he forgot who was on it.
“He’s got a long memory,” Riley says, “a detailed memory.”
Late January. Mayfield sees a post on X about newly hired Falcons coach Kevin Stefanski and the “dumpster fire” of quarterbacks he churned through in Cleveland. By this point it’s been four years since Mayfield’s messy exit from the Browns. He’s found a home in Tampa. Re-established himself as a franchise quarterback. Started a family.
And yet.
Failed is quite the reach pal. Still waiting on a text/call from him after I got shipped off like a piece of garbage. Can’t wait to see you twice a year, Coach. https://t.co/jUUsYkvlOC
— Baker Mayfield (@bakermayfield) January 20, 2026
His relationship with Stefanski soured badly during the 2021 season, which ended with Mayfield gutting through a torn labrum in his left shoulder. His play sagged down the stretch. Coach and quarterback barely spoke. Mayfield was sacked nine times in his final start, an ugly loss in Pittsburgh, and he fumed over protection calls that left a rookie tackle on an island against Steelers All-Pro T.J. Watt. Mayfield later wondered if the team set him up to fail.
He remembers the Browns telling him to have surgery after the season, and when he returned, he’d still be The Guy.
He found out they were chasing Deshaun Watson while he was at a concert with a teammate. When owner Jimmy Haslam tried to reach out, Mayfield ignored him. “I know that hurt him,” Carter says of the end in Cleveland.
List or no list, break his trust and he never forgets.
Mayfied led the Browns to their first playoff win in nearly three decades following the 2020 season. Less than two years later, Cleveland traded him. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
Mayfield has come to accept that his me-against-the-world mantra — “Just throw a rock in there and see how I handle things,” is how he describes it — played a role in his exit. “You can get lost in what’s truly important,” he admits, “and that’s how you handle relationships in the building.”
After Cleveland, he began to wrestle with a reputation he came to resent, that he was brash and immature, a maverick who couldn’t be trusted to lead an NFL franchise. He seethed over reports he wasn’t a good teammate. Nothing stung worse. Hadn’t he delivered the Browns their first playoff win in 26 years? Hadn’t he slogged through a battered shoulder the following season?
Only after brief stops in Carolina and Los Angeles — only after his career was “taken down to the studs,” Mayfield says — did he realize he had some growing up to do. The brash antagonist who ran from the cops in college and once barked at an opponent, “You forgot who daddy is, I’mma have to spank you today,” now had a new layer of humility.
But there was more, a private pain Mayfield hid from public view. It was only after a 2024 lawsuit he and his wife, Emily, filed that it came to light. The couple alleged a company run by Mayfield’s father and brother had transferred roughly $12 million out of the Mayfields’ personal bank accounts without their knowledge. Mayfield quietly withdrew the lawsuit a year later, and his attorneys declined to comment. The quarterback recently told The Tampa Bay Times that his icy relationship with his family has slowly started to thaw.
Three years in, Tampa has started to feel like home. The family is growing — the Mayfields now have two youngsters. After he found out their newest arrival would be a baby boy, a grinning Mayfield told reporters that he “was going to have a little s—head on my hands.”
He paused. “That’s karma,” he added.
Back in 2023, Licht wanted a player who’d add some rough edges to his roster. He ignored the narrative. Everything about Mayfield fit.
“Lot of turmoil, with his family and what happened in Cleveland,” the GM says. “His whole story, really. I think it helped build character. We always knew what his ceiling was — for crying out loud, no one’s won a playoff game there since he did.
“And personally, I like the swag. I like the attitude.”
Licht felt the QB’s wrath while hammering out Mayfield’s initial contract extension with the Bucs in 2024. At one point, the QB’s patience wore thin. “Can we get this f—ing thing done?” Mayfield texted his GM, adding a few more expletives for good measure. What he didn’t know is that Licht and his agent had just finalized the deal.
Licht called. “Listen up, a—hole,” he began, “we just agreed to terms.” Both laughed.
“He fits us,” Licht says, “because he came to a place where (head coach Todd Bowles) and the GM said, ‘Hey, be you.’”
The locker room echoes that: “Six” — as Mayfield is universally known — is one of them. He takes on his offensive linemen in “Mario Kart” and chugs beer with them at hockey games. He encourages anyone with nagging soreness to swing by his house and see his physiotherapist, then refuses to let them pay.
“I would never throw shade on Tom because I like my ring too much,” Licht says of Brady, who led the Bucs to a win in Super Bowl LV. “But Baker is just more … relatable.”
Left tackle Tristan Wirfs, Mayfield’s closest friend on the team, puts it this way: “Tom didn’t really do anything with us, because he couldn’t. Like, he couldn’t even go out to dinner. Then Baker comes in and the first day he asks me if I wanna grab a beer that night. I’m like, ‘This is sick!’”
There’s also the Mayfield moxie, the trash-talking, on-field fearlessness his teammates can’t help but respect.
“You want somebody you can go into a dark alley with,” says wideout Sterling Shepard. “That’s Six.”
And veteran Chris Godwin: “Bake’s really just an offensive lineman in a quarterback’s body.”
The linemen still laugh at this story from the end of the 2024 season, when the Bucs were struggling in a win-or-go-home game against the Saints. Mayfield slid late on a quarterback keeper, knowing he’d take a shot and his teammates would come to his defense. They did. A fight ensued. Mayfield walked away, says Bucs guard Cody Mauch, “like he just set off a bomb.”
“I remember us getting into it with them,” says wideout Jalen McMillan, “and I see Baker strolling out of there with this little grin on his face.”
Tampa Bay won and clinched a playoff spot.
“He’s just always had this mentality of, ‘I’m gonna have to kill this other person,’” Austin says. “It’s whatever it takes with him. He’s the best teammate I’ve ever had.”
Mayfield’s late-season slide has muddied his future in Tampa. (Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)
Now Mayfield faces the most consequential season of his career. A true franchise quarterback — the label he’s chased since he was shown the door in Cleveland — can’t fade down the stretch like he did a year ago. His touchdown-to-interception ratio, 16-2 across the season’s first nine games, plunged to 11-9 over the final eight.
If he shines, and leads the Bucs back to the playoffs, he’ll be in line for an extension that will pay him north of $50 million a year, cementing the status he’s long craved. If he stumbles or gets hurt, he could find himself looking for a new team, starting over, again.
Friction has a way of finding him. Mayfield welcomes it, eager to wager on the one person he’ll never bet against.