Baker Mayfield played the final 15 games of the 2025 season on a knee with both a sprained MCL and a sprained PCL, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback discloses in Season 3 of Netflix’s “Quarterback,” which begins streaming today.
The injury timeline, first reported by WTSP’s Evan Closky from early access to the series and detailed by CBS Sports and Pro Football Talk, runs nearly the length of the season: both knee ligaments sprained plus a bone bruise in the Week 2 win at Houston, a biceps/tendon injury in Week 3, the bone bruise aggravated in Week 7, and an AC joint injury in Week 12. Mayfield started all 17 games anyway. “Pain is miserable, but toughness shows how bad you want something,” he says in the series.
The numbers track the injuries almost week for week. Through six games Tampa Bay sat at 5-1 and Mayfield ranked eighth in yards per attempt and third in touchdown-to-interception ratio, per CBS Sports’ Zachary Pereles. From Week 7 on, those ranks fell to 31st and 26th, and the Buccaneers lost seven of their final nine to finish 8-9 and miss the playoffs — the ugliest stretch coming in a Week 12 loss to the Rams in which he went 9-for-19 for 41 yards before being pulled.
Teammates saw more than the injury report ever listed. “Baker had a lot of injuries that you didn’t expect a quarterback to play through,” former Bucs linebacker Lavonte David said on “The Arena” podcast back in April. “He was really trying to push and really trying to be the player that we needed him to be.”
The reveal changes how last season should be read. An evaluator looking at Mayfield’s 2025 line saw a quarterback who fell apart after October; the fuller record shows a quarterback whose body fell apart and who kept showing up anyway — the kind of ledger entry locker rooms remember longer than stat lines. It also lands two weeks before a contract-year camp: Mayfield is in the final season of his three-year, $100 million deal and has said extension talks stop once camp opens July 28. Whatever the front office decides his next contract is worth, the film from Weeks 7 through 18 now comes with context it didn’t have a week ago.
