Every "Bucs offense fell off" take in 2025 wanted to be about something big: Baker Mayfield regressing to his career mean, a 32-year-old Mike Evans breaking down, coordinator turnover, "the league figured them out." The data says the collapse was much narrower than any of those stories — and much more specific. Tampa's offense didn't get crushed at the line of scrimmage or blown up on deep shots. It fell apart on one throw, in one air-yard band, at one catch point.

Table of Contents

1. The top-line drop
2. Protection was fine
3. The one band that broke
4. The target-mix substitution
5. What it means

The top-line drop

Tampa Bay went from one of the most efficient offenses in football to a below-water unit in a single year. Their offensive EPA/play fell from +0.129 in 2024 to −0.009 in 2025, with the damage concentrated on the pass side: pass EPA/play cratered from +0.192 to −0.026, while the run game was essentially unchanged (+0.050 → +0.014). The team's record slipped with it, from 10-7 to 8-9.

That is a top-3-ish passing offense turning into a below-average one without changing quarterbacks. Mayfield threw 573 of TB's 574 pass attempts in 2024 and 549 of 564 in 2025 — same guy, same offense on paper.

Protection was fine

The intuitive first blame in any passing-game collapse is protection. It doesn't fit here:

Sack rate actually ticked down. Hit rate is flat to the third decimal. Whatever went wrong with Tampa's passing game in 2025 did not happen because the pocket collapsed more often — Mayfield was hit and sacked at the same rate he was when he was posting +0.19 EPA/play.

The one band that broke

Bucket Mayfield's throws by air yards and the story writes itself. His CPOE (completion percentage over expectation) by band:

That is a −8.2-point swing in expected-completion performance on the intermediate band alone, with completion percentage dropping nearly ten full points (59.1% → 49.3%). Every other bucket got worse — the whole offense got worse — but nothing else fell off a cliff like the 10-to-19-yard throw did.

And it wasn't as if Tampa retreated from the throw. Mayfield's share of dropbacks in the intermediate band actually rose, from 22.3% of attempts in 2024 to 24.7% in 2025. They leaned into their signature zone more, and got punished harder for it every time.

The target-mix substitution

The mechanism becomes obvious when you look at who was catching (or, mostly, not catching) those 10-to-19-yard throws.

2024 intermediate targets (top receivers):

2025 intermediate targets (top receivers):

The engine of Tampa's intermediate game in 2024 was Mike Evans catching 69% of his 42 mid-range targets at +8.26 CPOE — elite, sticky-hands football against tight coverage. Evans then played in only 8 of 17 games in 2025 (down from 14 in 2024), and his intermediate volume was cut nearly in half (42 → 25).

The player who inherited that volume was rookie Emeka Egbuka, and the numbers on his intermediate work were bleak: 44 targets, 34.1% completion, −25.32 CPOE. That's not "rookie growing pains" as a vibe — that is one of the worst air-yard-band CPOE marks you'll see on real volume, on the exact throw the offense was built around.

Chris Godwin filled in for 10 more intermediate targets at 30.0% completion and −27.37 CPOE. Between Egbuka and Godwin, that's 54 intermediate targets combined at a −25.7-ish CPOE, roughly the same intermediate volume Evans handled by himself in 2024 — at nothing remotely like the same catch rate.

The bright spots (Shepard at +11.4 CPOE, Otton at +22.7, Johnson at +3.4) actually suggest the throws themselves weren't the problem when they went to the right players. It really does look like a catch-point issue at specific target destinations.

What it means

To me, the surgical version of the 2025 Bucs offense story looks like this:

• Protection didn't degrade. Sack and hit rates were flat.
• Playcalling didn't back off the intermediate game — Tampa threw more 10-to-19-yard balls, not fewer.
• The intermediate band, which was Mayfield's best zone in 2024 relative to expectation, turned into his worst.
• The mechanism was a target-mix swap: 42 Evans intermediate targets at +8.26 CPOE were replaced, at the margin, by 44 Egbuka targets at −25.32 CPOE and 10 Godwin targets at −27.37.

None of that is a diagnosis of "Mayfield regressed" in any general sense — his non-intermediate CPOE went from +4.40 to −0.37, meaningful but not catastrophic. It's the intermediate throw that turned the offense from +0.129 EPA/play into −0.009, and the intermediate throw that broke because the receivers finishing those throws changed.

If Evans stays healthier and Egbuka's catch-point numbers regress toward what you'd expect a first-round rookie to grow into, I'd expect a lot of Tampa's 2025 offensive shortfall to come back on its own.