How Was Baker Mayfield Able To Replace Tom Brady?

We know the story of each man. Brady was the 199th overall pick in the 2020 draft by New England as an afterthought, and got his opportunity when Drew Bledsoe was injured and never looked back. Brady won seven Super Bowls in total, including one with the Bucs in the 2020 season.

The greatest quarterback of all time has won several Super Bowl MVPs, regular season MVPs, and holds various NFL records, including most career passing yards and touchdowns, and can be seen at the top of many Bucs’ records, including single season passing yards and touchdowns. As one of the greatest football players of all time, Brady will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer when he is eligible.

Mayfield has a story that has a contrasting path. A stud quarterback at the University of Oklahoma, he won the Heisman Trophy for his performance during the 2017 college football season, then was selected first overall in the 2018 NFL Draft.

But after a promising 2020 season in which he led Cleveland to a long-awaited playoff win, Mayfield’s career began a downturn the following season after suffering a shoulder injury that in part kept the Browns out of the postseason. The Browns traded him to the Panthers in 2022, who cut him towards the end of the year, and he latched on with the Rams, having one great performance, but many more forgettable ones.

His last shot to become a legitimate NFL starting quarterback came with the Bucs last season, and Baker Mayfield sure did make the most of it. He revived his career with 4,0444 passing yards, 28 touchdowns and a 9-8 record as the Bucs won the NFC South, won a home playoff game, and made it to the Divisional round of the NFC playoffs. Mayfield parlayed that success into a three-year, $100 million contract with Tampa Bay this offseason.

Baker Mayfield Had A Tough Act To Follow

Let’s remember, as Baker Mayfield was trying to save his own career, he also had to follow in the footsteps of Tom Brady. This isn’t just talking about the current face of the league or a player coming off of an MVP season, and we’re not even talking about just the NFL. Brady is viewed on the mountaintops of the most influential athletes with the likes of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Now Baker Mayfield had to be the guy to replace him in Tampa Bay.

How did he do it? Well, he didn’t have to change much.

Bucs head coach Todd Bowles explained how Mayfield did it while on the Rich Eisen Show on Tuesday.

“The first thing we told Baker when he came in was to be himself,” Bowles said. “Nobody’s going to follow Tom. Nobody’s going to walk in Tom’s shoes. Like I told him (Mayfield), you put Tom’s shoes on the shelf and you buy a new pair and you get used to that pair and you get used to walking in those because nobody’s going to walk in Tom’s pair. Baker did just that.”

Tom Brady and Baker Mayfield both play the game of football with a chip on their shoulder for some different reasons, and each QB has had some fiery on-field moments. But outside of that, there’s not many similarities in their stories and career paths. They didn’t even play in the same style of offense in Tampa Bay.

“He’s a completely different guy and player than Tom,” Bowles said. “We didn’t try to have the same system we had in place with Tom. We didn’t have the same scheme or anything like that. We wanted him to be himself, at the time we needed the leadership over there, we needed the spark plug over there. He gave us just that and he did all of that while being himself.”

The relationships with the quarterbacks and their teammates differ as well. That’s not to say one can work better than the other. Tom Brady came into Tampa with more personal accolades and glitz and glamour than the Bucs’ franchise has had to that point. Brady joined a team that didn’t make the playoffs for a decade. At times it took Bucs players to get over the mystique of playing with Brady, or why he was in Tampa. It almost felt like players were performing out of pressure of just knowing that playing great is all that Tom Brady knew, and it helped lead the Bucs to tons of success because of it.

Baker Mayfield came in the aftermath of the Brady era, which was without a doubt the best era in Bucs history. When Baker Mayfield had walked in, they had won a recent Super Bowl, won two straight division titles and made three straight playoff appearances. The Bucs also had just lost their megastar in exchange for a quarterback whose career was hanging on by a thread.

Of course it was going to be different.

Why The Bucs Players Love Baker Mayfield

But what the Bucs didn’t know was that Baker Mayfield was exactly what they needed as someone to take over for Tom Brady. His personality was different than Brady’s, but it immediately resonated with his Bucs teammates. It was more of a best friend vibe, and his Bucs teammates wanted to win with Baker Mayfield and knew they could down the stretch of the season.

“He’s a very fiery guy on the field,” Bowles said of Mayfield. “He’s a very enthusiastic guy. He has a linebacker’s mindset but he’s a very intelligent quarterback. He’s a great teammate off the field, he embraces guys off the field, eats with the guys, goes to lunch and dinner with the offensive and the defensive players. You’d think he’d be a linebacker or a lineman with the way he hangs out with those guys so much.

“So he brings the team in, he gives them hope because he always talks to those guys and when he leads on the field you want to listen because he’s the same every day as far as trying to win every play. Not just trying to win during the game, he tries to win in practice, the way he prepares he tries to win, and that gave us a different leadership we had than when we had the people from the past when we had Tom and those guys.

“Tom was already established. Baker wasn’t established at least not here from a credentials standpoint, so it was important that he came in to be himself and those guys embraced him. That’s how they saw him.”

Baker Mayfield still has a fiery personality born out of playing with a chip on his shoulder, and he still hasn’t forgotten the trials and tribulations of his career. It was the humbling of Mayfield playing for four different teams – the Browns, the Panthers, the Rams and the Bucs – all within one calendar year that humbled him and gave the resolve to make his time in Tampa Bay a successful one.

Mayfield didn’t have time to worry about Brady’s legacy with Bucs. He had to quickly forge his own.

“He grew up some,” Bowles said. “This league will humble you, coach or player, it will humble you at some point. He took some bruises over the years, he learned from them. He’s a very mature guy that way. He took the lumps and he came out on top and he bet on himself and he won.”

Check out the entire interview with Todd Bowles on the Rich Eisen Show that dives further into the Bucs and the upcoming season.