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# Tampa Bay's Passing Game Has Been Better With Jalon Daniels Than With Baker Mayfield
- URL: https://www.statsdigest.com/tampa-bay-offense-mayfield-daniels-2026/
- Published: 2026-10-16T18:01:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T18:01:02.000Z
- Description: Jalon Daniels has outproduced Baker Mayfield's EPA numbers in Tampa Bay's 1-4 start to 2026.
- Author: Bill Seifert
- Tags: Buccaneers, Baker Mayfield, Jalon Daniels, EPA, NFL offense, quarterback analytics

Five weeks into 2026, the Buccaneers are 1–4, and the preseason story about them has fallen apart in a very specific way. The case coming into the year was that Baker Mayfield's 2024 breakout had locked him in as a top-tier starter and the engine of a top-five offense. The results so far say otherwise. And the twist is sharper than "the offense regressed": Tampa Bay has moved the ball more efficiently in two starts (plus a relief appearance) from backup Jalon Daniels than it did in Mayfield's three starts.

## Table of Contents

1. The 2024 version that set the expectation
2. What Mayfield's three 2026 starts actually looked like
3. The two-year team pass-game slide
4. Daniels, and why the "Mayfield is the identity" story breaks

## The 2024 version that set the expectation

The preseason case for Mayfield was built on a real season. In 2024 he threw for 4,500 yards and 41 touchdowns on 612 dropbacks, posted a +0.175 EPA per dropback and a +3.60 CPOE, and Tampa Bay's offense followed him there: a team pass EPA/play of **+0.192**, 4th-best among all 32 teams that season (behind only Baltimore, Buffalo and Detroit).

That was a top-tier passing profile. It is also, now, two years in the rear view.

## What Mayfield's three 2026 starts actually looked like

Mayfield started the first three games of 2026 before a thumb injury sidelined him; he recorded zero dropbacks in Weeks 4 and 5 while Daniels played in his place. The game-by-game splits from those three starts are not a bad quarter or a bad half:

| Week | Opp    | Result  | DBs | EPA/db     | TD | INT | Sacks |
| ---- | ------ | ------- | --- | ---------- | -- | --- | ----- |
| 1    | at CIN | L 27–33 | 32  | **−0.247** | 0  | 0   | 4     |
| 2    | vs CLE | L 19–23 | 37  | **−0.367** | 1  | 1   | 3     |
| 3    | vs MIN | L 16–23 | 40  | **−0.272** | 1  | 1   | 6     |

Aggregated: **109 dropbacks, −0.297 EPA/dropback, 2 pass TDs, 2 INTs, 13 sacks, 615 passing yards**, a 34.9% success rate, and a CPOE of +0.32 — essentially league-average accuracy, with none of the per-play value. Among the 37 quarterbacks with at least 50 dropbacks so far this season, that −0.297 EPA/dropback is the **worst mark in the league**.

Put next to the 2024 and 2025 lines, this looks like three different quarterbacks:

| Season          | DBs | EPA/db     | CPOE  | TD | INT | Sacks | Yds   |
| --------------- | --- | ---------- | ----- | -- | --- | ----- | ----- |
| 2024            | 612 | +0.175     | +3.60 | 41 | 16  | 40    | 4,500 |
| 2025            | 584 | −0.006     | −2.12 | 26 | 11  | 36    | 3,693 |
| 2026 (3 starts) | 109 | **−0.297** | +0.32 | 2  | 2   | 13    | 615   |

One stat worth isolating carefully, since it's easy to conflate two different denominators: across those three 2026 starts, Mayfield personally was sacked on **11.9%** of his dropbacks (13 of 109) — a QB-specific, small-sample number. That's a notably higher rate than the *team's* season-long sack rate in either of the prior two years (see below), and it's worth tracking separately from the team figure as a larger sample accumulates.

## The two-year team pass-game slide

This is where it stops being a Mayfield story and starts being a Tampa Bay story. Team offensive pass EPA/play, same metric, three straight seasons:

| Season                         | TB pass EPA/play | League rank         |
| ------------------------------ | ---------------- | ------------------- |
| 2024                           | **+0.192**       | 4th of 32           |
| 2025                           | −0.026           | not recomputed here |
| 2026 (301 off. plays, 5 games) | **−0.186**       | 29th of 32          |

That's a step down in each of the last two years, not a one-week blip. The *team-level* sack rate (all Tampa Bay quarterbacks combined, sacks per dropback) has also climbed: **6.1% in 2024, 5.9% in 2025, 9.0% through five games of 2026**. That team-wide number is distinct from — and lower than — Mayfield's personal 11.9% sack rate in his three starts above; both point the same direction (protection and/or pocket decision-making have gotten worse), but they're not the same measurement and shouldn't be read as interchangeable.

On pass offense specifically, only Tennessee (−0.203), Miami (−0.216) and the Chargers (−0.232) have been less efficient than Tampa Bay so far in 2026\. In 2024 the Bucs were within shouting distance of the league's best three passing offenses (Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit); today they sit closer to Indianapolis (−0.161) than to the back of the top ten (around +0.14).

## Daniels, and why the "Mayfield is the identity" story breaks

Here is the part that complicates the preseason narrative. In relief and then two starts, backup Jalon Daniels has produced:

| Week                    | Role   | DBs | EPA/db     | TD | INT | Sacks |
| ----------------------- | ------ | --- | ---------- | -- | --- | ----- |
| 3                       | relief | 3   | −0.152     | 0  | 1   | 0     |
| 4 (vs GB, L 14–17)      | start  | 30  | −0.144     | 1  | 2   | 3     |
| 5 (at DAL, **W 24–16**) | start  | 26  | **+0.226** | 1  | 0   | 1     |

Overall: **59 dropbacks, roughly +0.02 EPA/dropback, 2 TD, 3 INT**, 337 passing yards, a 42.4% success rate, and a CPOE essentially at zero (−0.03). Daniels is not playing like a franchise quarterback — he's playing close to replacement level. But replacement-level has been roughly **0.3 EPA/dropback better** than what Mayfield produced in Weeks 1–3, and Week 5 gave Tampa its first win and its best passing game of the season.

The preseason story treated Mayfield as the thing holding this offense up. The first five weeks suggest the opposite: the passing game was struggling with him on the field, and has looked more functional, not less, without him. The injury that pushed him to the sideline has also reset what observers expect from this unit.

I'd stop short of calling Daniels the answer: 59 dropbacks is a tiny sample, pass protection remains a problem (he's already been sacked four times across his two starts), and his two interceptions in Week 4 aren't something a backup gets to repeat often. But the claim that simply reinserting Mayfield automatically fixes this offense isn't supported by what's happened on the field so far. Through five weeks, Tampa Bay's passing attack has produced better per-play numbers with its backup than its starter, and the two-year trend in team pass efficiency suggests the 2024 ceiling is further away than the preseason consensus assumed.

What I'd watch when Mayfield returns: whether the team sack rate pulls back toward 2024–25 levels (around 6%) or stays closer to this year's 9%-plus pace — that's more an offensive-line signal than a quarterback one — and whether his per-dropback EPA climbs out of the bottom of the league. If it doesn't, the 2024 season starts to look like the outlier rather than the baseline.