TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Baker Mayfield revived his career in Tampa Bay and became a coach-builder in the process.
Mayfield’s success with the Buccaneers in 2023 helped Dave Canales become head coach of the Carolina Panthers after just one season as an offensive coordinator. Mayfield has played even better under Liam Coen, who will be among the top candidates for coaching vacancies this offseason.
The Buccaneers (9-7) need a victory over the Saints (5-11) on Sunday to clinch their fourth straight NFC South title. With Mayfield and the offense playing at a high level, Tampa Bay has an opportunity to extend its season deep into January. The Buccaneers advanced to the divisional round of the playoffs last season before losing at Detroit.
At some point, Coen will get an opportunity to interview with other teams. The Jets, Saints and Bears are looking for new coaches with more openings to come next week.
Coen is focused on the task in front of him with the Bucs.
“That was one of the best Sundays I’ve had in a long time, man,” Coen said Thursday about a 48-14 victory over the Panthers. “And I wasn’t thinking about anything else besides this. So really, at the end of the day, that stuff can wait a long time if it’s the right thing. And for us to keep moving forward doing the right things, we can wait a long time on that one.”
Last year, Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson had several interviews but decided to return to Detroit instead of accepting a head coach position. He’ll be a hot candidate again this cycle.
Coen could follow a similar path, talk to a few teams, gain valuable interview experience and stay another year in Tampa Bay if the right situation isn’t available.
“Yeah, I do believe I’m ready to do so. I don’t think you’re ever truly fully ready, but yeah, that is a dream,” Coen said of his coaching aspirations. “Does that need to happen when I’m 39 years old and having probably the most fun of my life coaching and working and being here? No, that doesn’t mean that needs to occur right now. But yeah, that is the goal. That is absolutely the goal. But like I said before, that goal can hold off for a while here and continue to do what we’re doing. That would be pretty special.”
Mayfield threw for 4,044 yards with 28 touchdowns and 10 interceptions for a 94.6 passer rating in 2023. The Buccaneers had the 23rd-ranked offense in total yards, 17th in passing and last in rushing. They averaged 20.5 points per game.
This season, Mayfield has 4,279 yards passing, 39 TDs, 15 interceptions and a 107.6 passer rating. His 71.7 completion percentage is tied with Jared Goff for fifth-best in a single season. The Buccaneers are third in total offense, third in passing and fourth in rushing. They’re scoring 29.7 points per game.
“Great offensive coordinators always dial things up to the strengths of their players, and that’s what Liam has done,” Mayfield said. “He’s had to adjust on the fly. We were looking at this thing being in a lot of ’11′ personnel early in the year and then adjusting and seeing how this run game is growing. ... That package has just continued to grow. The great ones adjust, and Liam has done just that.”
Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles is on the verge of winning his third division title in three seasons with three different offensive coordinators. He fired Byron Leftwich following the 2022 season, just two years after the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl with Tom Brady. Canales came in from Seattle and brought out the best in Mayfield, who bounced around from the Browns to the Panthers to the Rams in 2022.
Coen spent 2023 as Kentucky’s offensive coordinator after serving in that role under Sean McVay with the Rams when Mayfield started four games for Los Angeles.
“It’s really attention to detail,” Bowles said about what Coen does best. “I think it all starts with the run game — how can we run it off of this? How can we throw it off of this? What did we do last week? What do we see? What do they see? And kind of putting it together that way so with the coaches collaborating upstairs and then giving it to the players and feeding it downstairs and Baker executing it all on the field — the camaraderie and the coordination with those guys, the chemistry of seeing it the same way has been very good.”
It all starts with Mayfield, the former No. 1 overall pick discarded by Cleveland when the Browns made a regretful trade for Deshaun Watson. His success turned Canales into a head coach and could do the same for Coen.
First, they have important business together in Tampa Bay. Everything else can wait.
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Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield passes for a touchdown against the Carolina Panthers during the first half of an NFL football game Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
FILE - Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen looks on from the sidelines during an NFL football game against the Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Texas, Dec. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Jerome Miron, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
