The healing continues for Baker Mayfield

TAMPA, Fla. — Baker Mayfield sat on the island in the kitchen of his South Tampa home, watching the Saints lose to the Falcons and feeling the season slip away. A day earlier, the Buccaneers had beaten the Panthers in their final game of the regular season, only to witness Carolina claim the NFC South anyway.

Tampa Bay was out of the playoffs, and Mayfield was left all alone with the cruelest kind of Sundays: nothing left to do but watch, wonder and replay everything that might have been different.

There was the pain of knowing the Bucs had controlled their own destiny and let it slip away. There was the physical toll of a season in which Mayfield played through eight different injuries. And there was the personal work that awaited him — the healing, rebuilding and reconnecting that extended well beyond football.

Moving forward meant confronting all of it: the plays he wished he could have back, the body that had taken a beating, and the parts of his life that needed mending.

“Frustrating knowing that we had so many opportunities to control our own destiny,” Mayfield recently told the Tampa Bay Times. “Just win one of those games and it would’ve been a different story. We wouldn’t have had to be cheering for the Saints at home on a Sunday instead of watching to see who we were going to play and getting ready for that.”

There also was the healing of a family.

Mayfield reconnected with his family when he and wife Emily took their then 1-year-old daughter, Kova, to Texas to meet her relatives in April 2025.

The family fracture began when Baker and Emily sought an audit of millions of dollars that had flowed unauthorized from their accounts into businesses connected to Baker’s father and brother. What they discovered several years ago led to a confidential settlement with Camwood Capital Management Group, with the defendants expected to repay $11.741 million, plus interest. Another lawsuit eventually was pursued when Mayfield and his representatives believed the agreement was not honored.

There were no easy fixes. Not for the season that slipped away. Not for the injuries that accumulated week after week. Not for the family wounds that cut far deeper than football.

But there has been progress. The couple welcomed their second child, a son named Maverick, this past April.

“In the past few months, I’ve been reconnected with my family,” Mayfield said. “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 first birthday. ... First time they met her, and you (could) tell it just melted them.

“You can’t put yourself on a pedestal and act like I haven’t made mistakes in my life. 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.”

One of Mayfield’s greatest strengths as a quarterback and teammate is how inclusive he has been since coming to Tampa Bay. During stretching and warmups, he runs with the offensive linemen and counts Tristan Wirfs as among his closest friends.

Mayfield is one of only three NFL quarterbacks to start the past 51 regular-season games, along with the Lions’ Jared Goff and the Bills’ Josh Allen. But he’s paid a heavy physical price for continuing to punch the clock.

Last season alone, Mayfield played through a right knee bone bruise that included an MCL and PCL sprain; a right biceps contusion that occurred in Week 3 against the Jets and impacted his throwing velocity; a left shoulder AC joint sprain that forced him to miss the second half of a loss to the Rams; an oblique strain; and a foot/toe injury as well as an illness.

“It really is like putting Mr. Potato Head back together on Monday,” Mayfield said.

Fortunately, for the past nine years Mayfield has worked with his “body guy,” physiotherapist Dave Matthews (not the musician). He was introduced to Matthews by quarterback Drew Stanton while they were in Cleveland.

“(Matthews) obviously watches the game because he’s part of the family,” Mayfield said. “Just seeing some of the text conversations with Emily, during the games, it’s too funny. He’ll say, ‘I think it’s this.’ Dave already has the analysis before I get any sort of doctor eval on the sideline. Whether it’s placebo effect or not, I know he’s really, really good at his job and he definitely helps me feel better.”

Mayfield invites his teammates to his home for Matthews to work on them and it turns into a family affair.

“I get Chris (Godwin), Luke (Goedeke), Tristan (Wirfs), Bucky (Irving). They’re at the house, they come over. Hang out,” he said. “We’re in the living room. We order food. It’s fun. It’s kind of a s--t show now with the kiddos involved, but the more the merrier. You go through it together and you’ve got to enjoy it, the good, the bad and the pain.’”

The closest Mayfield said he came to missing a game in three seasons was after the shoulder injury in Los Angeles. He couldn’t throw until the Friday before the game but still played and beat the Cardinals.

“I was like, ‘OK, this one might be a little iffy,’” Mayfield recalled. “But after I got the MRI results and the same left shoulder I had surgery on in ’21, as soon as I knew structurally it was OK, it’s pain and I’ll take care of that and work on the range of motion. As long as I’m able to throw.”

Mayfield will take the field Saturday night against the Chiefs in a preseason game, his first since that win over Carolina the final week of the 2025 season. He’s heard the doubters.

He’s in the final season of his three-year, $100 million contract. The deadline he set for talks to end a the start of training camp was for his teammates as much as for him.

“One, for head space,” he said. “I would’ve been fine regardless. I didn’t want that to be the daily topic for the team that’s always looming. We have a good chance to fly under the radar and be really, really good.”

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