Quarterback · Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Baker Mayfield

No. 6 · 9th season

Baker Mayfield played most of last season on a knee that wasn't right

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers were 5-1 and looking like something real. Then the season quietly started to unravel — and it turns out their quarterback was playing through it with a sprained MCL and PCL in his knee, an injury he'd been carrying since Week 2.

Mayfield revealed the extent of it on the new season of Netflix's Quarterback docuseries. A sprained MCL is a partial tear of one of the main ligaments that keeps the knee stable. A PCL sprain compounds that. Together, they're the kind of thing that would sideline most people for weeks. Mayfield kept going, and he was also dealing with a bicep issue and a separate shoulder problem — a separation at the AC joint — over the course of the year.

Tampa Bay finished 8-9 and missed the playoffs. That gap between where the team started and where it landed has a different color now. Some losses read as a collapse. Others read as a team trying to hold together while the person at the center of it was playing hurt in ways no one outside the locker room fully knew.

What it cost Mayfield to play through it — and whether anyone in the building fully weighed that against the season they were chasing — is the question this raises.

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