Baker Mayfield checked in at No. 77 on the NFL Top 100 Players of 2026, the league’s annual player-voted countdown, the Buccaneers announced this week. His peers watched him complete 343 of 543 passes for 3,693 yards and 26 touchdowns against 11 interceptions last season and decided that belonged among the hundred best performances in football.
What most of those voters did not know when the season ended: Mayfield played nearly all of it hurt. As he disclosed in Netflix’s ‘Quarterback’ this week, he sprained the MCL and PCL in his knee in Week 2 and kept starting, stacking further injuries on top through the fall. The 26 touchdowns came with a medical chart attached.
The ranking lands in the middle of a negotiation that has not moved all summer. Mayfield is in the final season of his three-year, $100 million contract, carrying an average annual value of $33.3 million — 16th among quarterbacks, per Spotrac, with a dozen passers above him earning at least $51 million per year. NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo reported earlier this month that Tampa Bay is in no rush to extend either Mayfield or Vita Vea, and Mayfield has said he will cut off contract talk once training camp begins. Veterans report at the end of the month. The window is measured in days now.
There is a coherent case for the front office’s patience: Mayfield turned 31 in April, the team collapsed from 5-1 to 8-9, and paying a quarterback $50 million a year off an injury-shadowed season is how cap problems get born. There is also a coherent case for urgency: quarterbacks who throw 26 touchdowns do not get cheaper by waiting, and the franchise-tag math in 2027 would be uglier than a deal struck this month.
Both cases can’t win. The Top 100 nod settles nothing at the negotiating table, but it does record how the men on the field see him — and 77th in the league is a strange ranking for a player his own team has not yet decided to keep.
