This story is part of FanSided’s Fandoms of the Year, a series spotlighting the teams, athletes and cultures that defined sports fandom in 2025.
Less than a minute left on the clock. Have the ball and down by a score. Backs up against the wall. This is a stressful situation for any fan, but for Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans this season, it’s become modus operandi. Needing to squeak out a one-score win at the last possible moment is just a normal Sunday to us, but the calmness doesn’t come from arrogance — Lord knows Bucs fans don’t have that kind of history — it comes from Baker Mayfield.
For a fandom that has mostly known nothing but darkness and misery, the idea of simply being in a comeback situation is entirely foreign. So it’s impossible to overstate just how important Baker has been not only in building himself into a player who exudes genuine confidence in those moments, but also in giving Buccaneers fans something so much more valuable than a simple win.
Baker Mayfield means everything to Buccaneers fans
To fully understand how we got here with Mayfield, you need to turn the clocks back to March 2023. In the aftermath of Tom Brady’s retirement, the Buccaneers didn’t have a succession plan in place to neatly transition into the franchise’s next chapter. There were decent free agent options, but none that fit the incredibly tight budget Jason Licht was working with.
Brady’s retirement, combined with the team having spent his entire tenure kicking the salary cap can down the road, saddled the Bucs with over $50 million in dead money.
After three years of chasing Super Bowls, the bill had come due. The Buccaneers were forced to take their medicine, and the franchise was staring down a truly dire situation — lots of roster holes, little money to fix them, and no neatly laid out plan forward.
That’s the context in which Baker Mayfield arrived in Tampa, but it’s so obvious now why the two were such a great fit.
Baker arrived in Tampa with something to prove
Much like the Bucs, Baker was listless. A once-mighty prospect with franchise quarterback potential, Mayfield was lost at sea. To say the wind had been sucked out of his sails would be to suggest he still had a mast at all; he was a broken player who was looking for his fourth team in a year.
Cleveland discarded him for what they thought was an upgrade in Deshaun Watson, and Carolina very quickly learned he wasn’t a fit. Part of that was the ineptitude of those organizations, but a lot of it was Baker simply having lost his way. He was a shell of the Heisman winner from Oklahoma, whose grit had helped bring the Browns their first playoff win since the first Clinton administration. Bad luck and his own poor play had reduced him to a parody of himself.
His very brief stint with the Los Angeles Rams was the spark that lit the powder with which canons would fire in Tampa Bay. He led a fourth quarter comeback win that gave us all a glimpse of what made him special, and it was a glimmer of hope that caught the eye of Jason Licht.
Four months later, Licht signed Baker to a one-year deal that was met with the same joke by almost everyone on Twitter. How can the Bucs go from Brady to Baker?!
Where uncertainty turned into identity
The two sides were made for each other. The Bucs, despite having been just launched back into the national spotlight with Brady, lacked an identity. Baker, who at least had some cultural currency from that Rams comeback to live off, needed to find a home.
Together, they found exactly what they needed, and it’s given fans in Tampa more than just wins.
Nobody is ever going to bemoan the Brady Era as anything other than spectacular, but it never felt earned. It was like entering a cheat code and skipping right to the good part; Brady signed in March 2020, and 11 months later, the Buccaneers were Super Bowl champions.
When Baker arrived, there was uncertainty. Vets who had followed Brady to Tampa were gone, and the team had been stripped back down to its core. Both the Bucs and Mayfield had to build themselves back from scratch, and through that, an identity began to form that fans hadn’t seen for years.
Most of the franchise’s half-century of existence had been drenched in haplessness and hopelessness. Two Super Bowls that came two decades apart were paid for in full by the tax of having to watch the team wallow in irrelevance for most of the other 48 years. So few times did the team have an identity that wasn’t directly associated with losing, which is what made the late 90s and early aughts teams so meaningful to fans.
“With Tom [Brady] in there, I think everyone was pretty stressed out,” Baker said during his second year in Tampa. “They wanted me to come bring the joy of football back.”
That was the missing piece, the hidden treasure. Baker brought the joy of being a Bucs fan back in ways we haven’t felt in eons. His grittiness was instantly imprinted on the locker room, and that has become a core piece of the team’s identity. Before Baker, asking someone to describe the Buccaneers was a bit of a mystery; now it’s a statement of pride.
Baker Mayfield brought joy back to Buccaneers fans
Before Baker, and not counting Brady, there was never any hope with the Bucs. No matter the situation, the default was to assume that somehow the team would find a way to lose – that was the identity. Now, and especially this season, there’s a justified confidence that feels wonderful to embrace. If the Bucs get down in a game, they’re never out, because Baker is captaining the ship, and it’s not in his nature to give up.
Not on a play, not on one of his signature Angry Runs, and not on the fans who have embraced him in ways others hadn’t.
Baker’s renaissance with the Bucs has been about more than just what he’s done on the field. He’s matured as a leader in the locker room, become a father by welcoming two children with his wife, Emily, and has embraced the community beyond football.
Where Brady chose to come to play in Tampa, Baker has made it his home. He opted to forego free agency, not even testing the market, to re-sign with the Bucs last offseason, and the relationships he’s fostered have fundamentally changed the franchise.
In the timeline of the Buccaneers’ history there’s a very distinct “before” and “after” that revolves around a key quarterback signing, but it’s Baker, not Brady. Bucs fans have a whole new confidence thanks to him, and there’s a deeply rooted pride that didn’t exist before he arrived.
Baker didn’t just have a season where he was an MVP candidate, nor has he simply grown as a top-tier quarterback who is finally realizing his potential. He made it fun to be a Bucs fan again and reminded us what it feels like to enjoy rooting for this team. He changed the identity of being a fan as much as he transformed the locker room.
That feeling hasn’t so authentically existed in years, but it’s all been baked into the experience of watching Mayfield revive his career with the Bucs. It hasn’t always been easy or pretty, but it’s a joy that feels so tremendously earned, and for the first time in 50 years, it feels like the good times aren’t just rolling, but they’re here to stay as long as Baker is in Tampa Bay.