Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby says four quarterbacks stand out as the hardest in the NFL to sack.
Asked in a kick.com interview who he considers the hardest to sack in the league, Crosby named Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, Bills quarterback Josh Allen and Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield.
“Mahomes has definitely got to be up there, Lamar is a freak athlete, he’s so quick and fast. Josh Allen is like my size playing quarterback, but you’ve got to really fucking tackle him. I’d say those three are the top,” Crosby said. “A sleeper one, too: Baker Mayfield. He pissed me off. I had two of them I should have had on him. He ducked under, got under them. I was fucking livid. Baker’s tough. I like Baker.”
Crosby never sacked Mayfield in that game (the photo accompanying this post shows one of the near-sacks that Mayfield escaped), and Mayfield threw for three touchdown passes in a 28-13 Buccaneers win. Crosby hasn’t forgotten.
Bucs Clips
Defensive lineman Pat O’Connor will not be playing any more football.
O’Connor announced his retirement in an Instagram post on Thursday. O’Connor entered the league as a Lions seventh-round pick in 2017, but moved on to the Bucs after being released and played in 68 games for the team. That run included a Super Bowl win and O’Connor returned to Detroit for his final two seasons.
“If you had told my younger self that I’d play this long, spend my entire career with just two teams, get drafted, and win a Super Bowl, he would have called you crazy. But here we are,” O’Connor wrote in his post.
O’Connor had 52 tackles, seven tackles for loss and 2.5 sacks in 88 career games. He also had two tackles in seven playoff appearances.
Yes, it will be interesting to have Jon Gruden back in a broadcast booth. Assuming he’s not the same Jon Gruden who was trying not to burn bridges during the eight years he spent at ESPN.
Unfiltered Gruden is the best Gruden. And he left the filter home when recently discussing the state of the game with Cam Heyward.
“I’m worried about the game to be honest with you,” Gruden said regarding the state of quarterback play, via Nate Brinkerhoff of USA Today. “A lot of people think the game is evolving. I think the game is dissolving.”
Gruden blames it on communication, or lack thereof.
“We’re just not communicating,” Gruden said. “I always use these three letters ‘RCE.’ You got to recognize the defense, recognize the coverage, and then you start to communicate. You can change the play, you can stay with the play, but you got to be a great communicator. And if you can recognize defenses, communicate what you want to do, you got a chance to execute.”
That process requires time to read the defense and react accordingly.
“When you just run up to the line of scrimmage, clap your hands, and hope for the best,” Gruden said. “I can’t take all these RPO bubble screens and high turbo tempo offenses with six false starts a game and no communication. . . . I’d rather slam my hand in a car door than watch some of this.”
As Gruden sees it, the problem isn’t at the professional level. It’s at the college level.
“A lot of these guys are on four or five different colleges,” Gruden said. “I mean they transfer from one college to another. There’s no continuity and you know repetition is the mother of learning. You had to get into the same stance, do the same drills and the same defense for a period of years. And that’s how you master the techniques.”
And while Gruden’s immediate aspiration is to call games as the play-by-play announcer, he continues to keep the door open to coaching.
“I would love to get into a locker room and start putting together some game plans again,” Gruden said. “I miss it, man. But, we’ll take one day at a time and all you can do is prepare yourself for somebody to toss you the chalk and interview you. . . . I’ll be ready if somebody does.”
While waiting for someone to toss him the chalk, Gruden will be possibly throwing a headset while broadcasting a game featuring some of the bad habits that will bring out his inner Chucky.
Who usually doesn’t lurk very far below the surface.
The Buccaneers giveth. And the Buccaneers taketh away.
The team posted on Monday a video based on the viral clip of a bison flipping a 65-year-old man into the air at Yellowstone National Park. On Tuesday, the video was deleted.
The team added no comment to its Twitter page regarding the decision to delete the video.
It was up overnight. And, via JoeBucsFan.com, it was still present at 10:30 a.m. ET.
The man who was flipped by the bison underwent surgery and is expected to recover. Once he fully recovers, maybe other teams will be inclined to find a way to use it.
By then, of course, there will be some other viral video that will have made us forget about this one.
Jon Gruden wants to work play-by-play on an NFL broadcast. And he will.
Appearing on WDAE in Tampa, Ira Kaufman said Gruden will handle play-by-play duties for an NFL preseason game “in about a month.”
Kaufman offered no further details as to the date, the teams, or whether it’ll be a full game or part of a game.
“I want to be play-by-play,” Gruden recently said on The Ira Kaufman Podcast. “You know, Frank Gifford, he transitioned into the play-by-play role. I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys — [Mike] Tirico. And I’d like to give that a shot, man.”
The assignment comes at a time when Gruden has active civil litigation against the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell over the events that led to Gruden’s forced resignation from the Raiders during the 2021 season. Emails Gruden had sent and received while working for ESPN had made their way into thousands of documents collected during the first investigation of the Washington franchise.
Someone leaked those emails, which contained various forms of problematic content, to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After the first leak, Gruden did not resign. After the second, he did.
Between his stints with the Buccaneers and a second run as Raiders coach, Jon Gruden served as the analyst on Monday Night Football for nine years.
Gruden now wants to return to the booth, in a very different role.
“I was a broadcaster for nine years; hell’s bells,” Gruden said on The Ira Kaufman Podcast, via JoeBucsFan.com. “I want to be play-by-play. You know, Frank Gifford, he transitioned into the play-by-play role. I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys — [Mike] Tirico. And I’d like to give that a shot, man.”
It would be great to hear Gruden in any capacity, as long as he removes the restrictor plate that kept him from being as good as he could have been as a take-no-prisoners flamethrower. But he didn’t want to burn any bridges, because he planned to go back to coaching at some point. As a result, we never got to enjoy the full Chucky experience.
Of course, it could be difficult for Gruden to get a shot with any of the NFL’s current broadcast partners. His tiger-by-the-tail lawsuit against the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell would complicate any such efforts, to say the least.
But let’s find out if he’s got the chops. Someone should hire him for a low-level college game and see what he can do. Good, bad, or ugly, it would definitely generate more viewers than the telecast would otherwise attract.
It was inevitable.
Some NFL team was bound to pounce on the viral moment of a bison tossing a 65-year-old man into the air at Yellowstone National Park. And while it made the most sense for the Bills to incorporate the video into Mr. Brightside, the Bucs were the first NFL team to appropriate Mr. Upside-Down.
The Buccaneers posted on Monday the key portion of the clip, over banjo music, with a cut to receiver Tez Johnson in midair doing a flip after scoring a touchdown.
“Flipping out because it’s almost football season,” the caption declares.
Many were surprised by the aggressive decision to lean into the example of the exploits of an aggressive wild animal. The man, after all, was seriously injured. He reportedly has undergone surgery and is expected to recover.
That doesn’t stop the Bills from fully embracing the video, especially if they’re inclined to bring the man to Buffalo (along with his Dolphins jersey-wearing grandson) to the new stadium for the Week 11 game against Miami.
Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield is tough. Very tough. Perhaps tough to a fault.
Via Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times, Mayfield reveals in the upcoming season of Quarterback that, in 2025, he played with a sprained MCL and PCL in his knee from Week 2 on.
Mayfield also had a “bad biceps contusion” in his throwing arm, and he injured the shoulder of his non-throwing arm.
If Mayfield had a knee injury for that much of the season, it didn’t show up in the injury reports. “Knee” wasn’t listed at all until Week 5.
Here’s the full breakdown of the 10 weeks in which Mayfield appeared on the injury report: Week 3 (foot/toe), Week 4 (right biceps), Week 5 (right knee/biceps), Week 8 (knee), Week 10 (knee/oblique), Week 12 (illness), Week 13 (left shoulder), Week 14 (left shoulder), Week 15 (left shoulder), Week 18 (right shoulder/knee).
It underscores the fact that the NFL’s injury-reporting rules don’t contain nearly enough information. Sometimes, players simply don’t tell the team about their injuries. Sometimes, players get treatment away from the team’s facility.
Regardless, at a time when inside information has become a problem when it comes to gambling in other sports, every story about a player being more injured than the official reports revealed becomes another situation in which someone who knew the hidden truth can misappropriate the knowledge.
Lavonte David announced his retirement in March, but a move the Bucs made the next month gave their longtime linebacker cause to wonder if he should have stuck around for a 15th season.
The Bucs used their first-round pick to select edge rusher Rueben Bain and David recounted a conversation that he had with the rookie during an appearance on This is Football with Kevin Clark of ESPN. David said that he thinks Bain is part of an “amazing” roster in Tampa and that he briefly wondered if he made a mistake by retiring before having a chance to share the field with the University of Miami star.
“They are going to be some animals,” David said. “I knew Bain already. I reached out to him after he got drafted, he told me, man, like, ‘Man, I wish you just waited one more year.’ And, I was like in my mind like, ‘Maybe I should have, but, you know, the deal is done already. I’m out, my guy.’ But, I told him I’m definitely going to be there to be supporting him and stuff like that. I definitely have high hopes for those guys.”
It doesn’t sound like David is still giving any thought to playing, but he said he has thought about moving into coaching at some point in the future. If that should happen in Tampa, David will have a chance to help make sure Bain lives up to his potential.
The clock keeps ticking for the Buccaneers and Baker Mayfield.
The Bucs are reportedly in “no rush” to extend Mayfield’s contract, which expires after the 2026 season. Mayfield has imposed a deadline for getting something done before the start of training camp.
The Buccaneers report for camp on July 28, only 19 days from now.
The problem seems to be simple to identify, anything but simple to solve. The market for veteran starting quarterbacks currently has a range of more than $40 million per year, from the low 20s to the mid 60s. Where does Mayfield land in that landscape?
While he’ll reportedly be getting $40 million this year (due to money that carried over from 2025), the APY remains $33.33 million. And the cash due this year under his contract is $27 million, with up to $5 million in incentives.
As we hear it, the Buccaneers believe they’ll offer Mayfield more than any other team would put on the table. They likely also believe that, when they move to their bottom-line position (probably just before July 28), Mayfield will take it.
And maybe he will. Sometimes, the bird in the hand — while not as big as Baker may like — is too large to let fly away. Especially since he’ll be carrying the risk of injury and sudden ineffectiveness through all 17 games of the 2026 season.
Mayfield, however, seems to be wired a little differently. He’s stubborn, in what some would say is a good way. He may stand on principle with this one, based on the fact that other quarterbacks with equal or lesser skills and abilities have cracked the $50 million APY threshold.
The Buccaneers may welcome this approach, confident that, whatever he does this season, they’ll still offer more than any other team.
That’s what happened after 2023, his first year in Tampa. Mayfield’s one-year deal expired, the Buccaneers didn’t use the franchise tag for 2024, and no one else made a serious play for his services. (Even though multiple teams should have.)
This time, the franchise tag (based on a 2026 cap number of $39.975 million), would be at least $47.97 million. If the Bucs win the Super Bowl or Mayfield becomes an MVP finalist, they’d be able to tag him for 2027.
But if Mayfield has a good-not-great year, and if the Bucs play it out with the same belief that they’ll offer him more than anyone else, here’s where Mayfield’s moxie can become a problem for the Bucs: he could take less from another team, just to prove a point.
And the one team that should be ready to make a move is the Steelers, where Mayfield’s mentality (and history with the Browns) would resonate with the fanbase in a big way.
If Mayfield goes, the Bucs would go back to the drawing board at quarterback. The other options currently on the roster are Jalon Daniels, Jake Browning, and Connor Bazelak.
So while it seems the Buccaneers have a plan, they need to account for the possibility that, if they make Mayfield play out the last year of his deal and don’t tag him, he could go elsewhere for less money — just to prove a point. And, based on the potential zeal with which he’s recruited, to embrace a team that truly wants him instead of a team that he may regard as being ambivalent about keeping him around.
