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.
