Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker kicked a 69-yard field goal on the final play of the first half Saturday night.
Butker and the Chiefs celebrated as if it was an NFL record . . . and it would have been had it been the regular season.
Jaguars kicker Cam Little kicked a 68-yard field during a Nov. 2, 2025, game against the Raiders to set the record. Little had a 70-yard field goal as time expired against the Steelers in the 2025 preseason.
Butker’s kick cleared the crossbar by a few yards.
He also had field goals of 45 and 58 yards in the first half as the Chiefs lead the Bucs 9-0 at halftime.
Bucs Clips
On Saturday night, the Buccaneers will host the Chiefs for a preseason game. And the contest will be called, from the home team’s perspective, by Jon Gruden and Ronde Barber. Gruden will be handling the play-by-play duties, with Barber acting as the analyst.
But it sounds as if it will be far from a traditional broadcast. Via JoeBucsFan.com, Gruden recently addressed the plan for the effort in an appearance on The Ronde Barber Show.
“This might be a concept, you never know,” Gruden said. “This concept could be a game-changer in the broadcast booth. . . . I mean, there’s been a conventional way. I sat up there for nine years and did it. Mike Tirico, there was a cadence. ‘First-and-10, it’s da-ta-da-ta-da-ta-da,’ and then you have to be timely in your responses and get out before the next play. But I think as long as we’re on the same page, we love Tampa Bay Buccaneers. We’re going to try to really educate the fans on some of the position battles, just the excitement of opening day in our stadium.”
It will be interesting to see how they handle the game. It was always difficult to envision Gruden sticking to the nuts and bolts of what’s happening during a play without blurting out “what the hell was that?” before laying out for Barber’s input.
And maybe it will be a game-changer. Maybe, in time, the current formula of non-athlete narrator of the action plus one or two former players or coaches will be replaced by two or three former players and coaches who supplement the visuals with the kind of commentary that will pivot from describing what we can all see to peeling back the curtain as to what’s really happening.
But here’s the key — it can’t be a bunch of jargon. It has to be communicated in a way that makes it seem simple and easy to understand by a casual fan.
However it goes, we’ve heard that Gruden and Barber have been putting in a lot of work to prepare for this. They have a strategy. We’ll find out on Saturday night how they execute it.
Last year, the Buccaneers started strong, at 6-2. It ended with a 2-7 meltdown.
Many have blamed coach Todd Bowles for the collapse. Defensive tackle Vita Vea does not.
Vea shared on Thursday his thoughts about what went wrong last year.
“There’s a bunch of stuff,” Vea said, via JoeBucsFan.com. “I feel like I kind of want to set the record straight. I feel like [there is] a lot of stuff going about on Bowles. I feel like none of it is Bowles’ fault; I feel like we all love Bowles, the players in the locker room.
“So that’s one thing I want to set the record straight at; we all love Bowles. It’s not what he’s doing. You know, he’s telling us what to do, giving us all the answers to the test and it’s on us players to be able to go out there and execute what he’s telling us to do. He’s always putting us in the best position to play. So, that’s one of the main things, is being able to take coaching.
“And in that light, if anything, blame us players for not executing. Bowles always puts us in the best position to win games. I even told Bowles, the day he retires is the day I retire.”
Bowles arrived as Tampa Bay’s defensive coordinator in 2019, Vea’s second NFL season.
Despite Vea’s defense of Bowles, it feels like the heat is on for 2026. The NFC South is wide open, and the Bucs are the betting favorites to win it.
If they don’t, an ownership group that hasn’t hesitated to make changes could be looking to make another one.
Defensive tackle Vita Vea’s contract impasse with the Buccaneers came to an end on Wednesday when he agreed to a one-year extension that ties him to the team through 2027 with $30 million in new money.
That agreement came after Vea requested a trade heading into training camp, but Vea said at a Thursday press conference that his intent was never to move to another club. Vea said that “home is where the heart is” and made it clear that his heart was always in Tampa.
“I always wanted to be a Buc,” Vea said. “I wanted to be a Buc for life. That’s why I’m glad we were able to get this done. This is something that happens every year, it just so happened to be me this year. There’s just stuff we had to figure out on both sides and we got it all squared away.”
Vea has not practiced this summer and the word at Bucs camp has been that he’s been sidelined after tweaking his back during a conditioning test. Vea won’t play this week and head coach Todd Bowles said that he won’t play in the preseason finale either, but the new contract should clear the way for him to get ready for Week 1.
The Buccaneers announced the one-year extension for defensive lineman Vita Vea on Wednesday.
The deal took longer and was more acrimonious than expected, with Vea requesting a trade before holding in at training camp. Ultimately, though, both sides got what they wanted.
The Bucs will have Vea through at least the 2027 season, and Vea received $30 million in new money.
“Vita is exactly the type of player and person we want to build around in Tampa Bay,” General Manager Jason Licht said in a statement. “He has been a dominant force in the middle of our defense, an exceptional teammate, and a tremendous leader in our locker room. One of the keys to our recent success has been our ability to draft, develop and re-sign core, foundational players who set the standard for what it means to be a Buccaneer. As one of our team leaders, Vita has played a big role in establishing that winning culture, and we are excited to have him continuing to help lead the way as we pursue our next championship.”
Vea, the 12th overall selection in the 2018 draft, has appeared in 112 games with 107 starts over the past eight seasons. He has recorded 256 tackles, 35 sacks, 48 tackles, 79 quarterback hits, three forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries and nine passes defensed.
His 35 sacks rank eighth in franchise history.
One of the last 2026 hold-ins has ended.
The Buccaneers and defensive tackle Vita Vea have reached agreement on a one-year extension, per Adam Schefter of ESPN.
It’s a one-year, $30 million extension. Given that he was due to make $18 million in 2026, it becomes a two-year, $48 million deal.
Schefter adds that Vea gets $6 million in new money this year. That pushes his pay to $24 million for 2026.
The initial report doesn’t indicate that the deal is fully guaranteed. If not, it’s basically a $6 million raise with no commitment from the team for 2027.
Vea had avoided practice as he sought a new deal. He had repeatedly asked to be traded. In the end, the Bucs sweetened the pot enough to get him to stay with the only NFL team for which he has played.
A first-round pick in 2018, Vea has appeared in 112 regular-season games with 107 starts. He made the Pro Bowl in 2021 and 2024, and he was a member of the Super Bowl LV-winning team in 2020.
As franchise quarterbacks with family fractures go, most of the attention is given to Aaron Rodgers. But Baker Mayfield has also had some significant friction in his family, through no fault his own.
Via Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times, Mayfield said the fences are being mended.
It started when Mayfield and his wife, Emily, began to seek an accounting of millions that Mayfield’s father and brother had siphoned into their businesses. The situation sparked an initial lawsuit, along with a settlement requiring repayment of $11.741 million. A second lawsuit was filed when Mayfield believed the settlement was being violated.
“In the past few months, I’ve been reconnected with my family,” Mayfield said, per Stroud. “It’s been good. Also, for them to have two grandbabies, it’s tough. What’s in the past is in the past. Emily and I took [Kova] down right around her second birthday. . . . First time they met her, and you [could] tell it just melted them.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Mayfield to let bygones be bygones, given the amount of money that was gone.
“You can’t put yourself on a pedestal and act like I haven’t made mistakes in my life,” Mayfield said. “I had the ability to forgive and that was what I wanted to get across. But we’re here and the door is open. The past few months, we have made good progress and began reconnecting.”
Family is everything, as Hector Salamanca once said. The fact that Mayfield could forgive the mishandling of his hard-earned money is an impressive thing. Many wouldn’t be able to do that.
The Bills are signing free agent defensive lineman Greg Gaines, Jeremy Fowler of ESPN reports.
In a corresponding move, Fowler reports the Bills have released defensive tackle Tommy Akingbesote.
Gaines, 30, spent last season with the Buccaneers. He appeared in all 17 games with four starts, seeing action on 369 defensive snaps, and he totaled 23 tackles and two sacks.
The Rams selected Gaines in the fourth round of the 2019 draft, and he was with the team for four seasons. He signed with the Bucs in 2023 and spent three seasons in Tampa.
In his career, Gaines has appeared in 108 games with 34 starts. He has totaled 186 tackles, 14.5 sacks and 35 quarterback hits.
It gets a little exhausting when an NFL franchise finds motivation from the fact that: (1) the team hasn’t performed up to snuff; and (2) others have noticed.
Regardless, every team needs a reason to try a little harder. For the Bucs, their late-season collapse has created an earned narrative that they’ll now try to defy.
“I think we’re going to shock a lot of people this year,” Mayfield said Tuesday, via JoeBucsFan.com. “And so I’m excited.”
And, yes, the motivation is coming from the noise that the Bucs aren’t expected to fare very well, after missing the playoffs last year for the first time since 2019.
“You can’t avoid it,” Mayfield said. “The TVs [are] everywhere. Everybody’s picking us probably to have a losing record.”
Well, they had a losing record last year. A 6-2 start was followed by a 2-7 finish and, thanks to the Falcons beating the Saints on the last Sunday of the season, a lost tiebreaker to the Panthers for the NFC South crown.
The 2026 road for the Bucs begins in Ohio, against the Bengals. Baker relishes starting the season on the road.
“You’re with your guys, and it’s just the Bucs against everybody else in that city you’re going to, and so I think it’s a good opportunity for us against the Bengals,” Mayfield said.
The Buccaneers pulled off a road upset in Mayfield’s first game with the team, beating the Vikings to start the 2023 season. The Bucs won their first road game in 2024, upsetting the Lions at Ford Field. Last year, Tampa Bay beat the Falcons in Atlanta to open the regular season.
The Bucs will need a fast start and something other than last year’s disintegration in order to get back to the postseason. And they’ll be using the natural conclusions drawn from the sluggishness to cap 2025 as the spark for 2026.
Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield didn’t play at all in the 2025 preseason, but the team is taking a different approach this summer.
Head coach Todd Bowles said on Monday that Mayfield will be in the lineup for Tampa’s second preseason game. The Bucs will host the Chiefs on Saturday night.
Bowles said that the team’s other healthy starters will also see playing time against Kansas City. The Bucs did not play their first string against the Jets in last Friday’s preseason opener.
Mayfield is heading into the final year of his contract and spent the offseason looking for a new deal, but has been practicing at training camp despite the lack of movement toward an agreement.
