On August 31, 2026, Baker Mayfield stood in front of cameras at his own charity event in Tampa, hours after the Buccaneers had cut their roster down to 53 players, and talked about a quarterback nobody had drafted three and a half months earlier. "I'm proud of Jalon," Mayfield said. "Played his tail off, worked hard." The Jalon in question, Jalon Daniels, had just beaten out a veteran the team signed specifically to be its backup, and walked away with the job himself.
That is not supposed to happen. An undrafted free agent, or UDFA, is a college player who goes unselected in the NFL Draft and then signs with a team on his own, with no guaranteed roster spot and none of the leverage a draft pick carries. A QB2 is the backup quarterback, the player whose entire job is to be ready if the starter goes down, without the benefit of the practice reps starters get. Going from the first label to the second in one training camp is rare enough that the Buccaneers' own general manager said he could not remember it happening in the league in a decade.
Six years, one record book
Daniels arrived at Kansas in 2020 as a freshman during a lost season, starting six games as the Jayhawks finished 0-9. He completed 76 of 152 passes for 718 yards with one touchdown and four interceptions, numbers that gave no hint of what came later. In 2021 he lost the starting job in camp to Jason Bean, then took over when Bean was hurt, throwing for 860 yards and seven touchdowns across three starts and beating Texas in Austin for the first time in program history, a result that snapped a long losing run for a Kansas program still years from national relevance.
2022 was the breakout. Daniels won the starting job outright and led Kansas to a 3-0 start, its best opening since 2009. He threw for 324 yards and four touchdowns against Duke and put up five total touchdowns and 100 rushing yards in a win over Houston, earning Big 12 and national player of the week honors along the way. A shoulder injury against TCU cost him four games, but he still closed the year with a Liberty Bowl performance that set a Kansas record for passing yards in a single game.
The back injury that shaped his draft profile came next. Named the Big 12's preseason player of the year for 2023, the first Kansas player to receive that honor, Daniels hurt his back in summer camp and missed the season opener. He tried to play through it against Texas but the injury flared again in pregame warmups, and he did not play another snap that season [CHECK: exact game-by-game timeline of the 2023 back injury against contemporaneous Kansas beat reporting]. He returned for 2024, starting 12 games and throwing for 2,454 yards, and then used a sixth season of eligibility in 2025 to close out his college career: 198 of 319 passing for 2,531 yards and 22 touchdowns, plus 404 rushing yards and four more scores on the ground, in a 5-7 season. He finished second in Kansas history in passing yards, completions and touchdown passes.
Why nobody drafted him
None of that was enough to get him picked in April 2026. Daniels measured in at just over 6 feet and 219 pounds with a 4.65-second 40-yard dash at his pre-draft workouts, respectable but not special for the position. The bigger issue was durability. He had missed significant time in three of his six college seasons, and JoeBucsFan's preview of his path to the roster put it bluntly, guessing that his inconsistency on tape traced back to how often he had been hurt in college.
His age worked against him too. Daniels turned 23 during the pre-draft process, old for a rookie after six years in one program, and evaluators questioned whether a quarterback from Kansas' shotgun-heavy spread offense could adjust to NFL mechanics. Preseason broadcasts flagged exactly that: Daniels had visible trouble taking snaps from center and communicating in the huddle early in camp, carryover from a college system that rarely used either. [CHECK: named 2026 draft analysts and specific published grades on Daniels, none located in the outlets searched] Six years of tape, a fresh back injury on his file and an unusual mechanical profile added up to zero teams calling his name across three days and seven rounds.
Signing in Tampa
The Buccaneers signed Daniels as a college free agent on May 8, 2026, one of a UDFA class that also included defensive back Ayden Garnes, another player who would go on to make the final roster. As with almost all undrafted free agent deals, no guaranteed money or signing bonus for Daniels was reported publicly [CHECK: contract or signing bonus figure for Daniels, not published in the outlets searched]. It was a low-risk flier on a player with more college starting experience than most UDFAs ever get, and Tampa Bay had a clear opening: the backup job behind Mayfield was unsettled, and the team had brought in veteran Jake Browning that spring specifically to compete for it.
Daniels spent the offseason program and training camp working under offensive coordinator Zac Robinson, learning an NFL playbook after six years in one college system. By the time preseason games started, the raw traits, the arm strength, the mobility, the poise in a broken pocket, were showing up on tape, even as the mechanical rough edges Kansas left behind were still visible.
Three preseason games, one job
Preseason gameComp/AttYardsTDResult
vs. New York Jets
10-of-15
111
1 rushing (1-yard sneak)
Bucs win, 24-16
vs. Kansas City Chiefs
9-of-14
71
1 passing (to Ko Kieft)
Bucs win, 16-15
at Jacksonville Jaguars
8-of-15
57
none, 1 fumble
Bucs loss, 19-0
Against the Jets, Daniels came in behind fellow hopeful Connor Bazelak and immediately looked more comfortable, hitting Garrett Greene for a 35-yard gain and grinding out a 16-play touchdown drive before punching in the winning score himself from a yard out. Bowles liked what he saw. "He went in relaxed," Bowles said afterward, "played very confident in the pocket, made the right reads."
The Chiefs game was better still. Down 9-0 at halftime, Daniels led all three of Tampa Bay's scoring drives after the break, including a 2-yard touchdown pass to tight end Ko Kieft, and closed the game out late in the fourth quarter. Browning, competing for the same job, was sacked three times and managed only punts. By the time the preseason finale in Jacksonville rolled around, a rough outing behind a backup offensive line, an 8-of-15 night with a fumble, barely dented the momentum Daniels had built. Bowles started him anyway, wanting, in his words, "to see more of him" against Jacksonville's twos before the real decision came down.
Cutdown day
The Buccaneers finalized their 53-man roster on August 31, 2026, and Daniels was on it as the backup quarterback. Browning, the veteran they had signed months earlier to fill that exact role, was released. Licht did not dress it up. "It's an incredible accomplishment for an undrafted rookie to get that position," he told reporters, adding that the team would rather carry a talented, less experienced arm than lean on experience for its own sake. Bazelak, the other rookie in the mix, did not survive the cuts either.
For Tampa Bay, the move is a real bet. The Buccaneers have not started a backup quarterback in a regular season game since Ryan Fitzpatrick in 2018, and handing that responsibility to a player with zero regular season snaps, however he got there, carries obvious risk if Mayfield were to miss time. Mayfield has been durable in Tampa, but every team is one hit away from needing its QB2, and the Buccaneers just chose a rookie who was throwing passes for Kansas ten months ago over a veteran they paid to be ready for exactly that moment.
Licht and Bowles both framed the decision as merit-based, forced by what happened on the field rather than a plan drawn up in the spring. Bowles said the coaching staff wanted to keep watching him even after he had already outplayed Browning twice, a sign the competition was taken seriously rather than settled early. Daniels beat a veteran for a job that almost never opens up for a player who was not drafted, and he did it inside a single training camp, with a back injury and an unconventional college resume on his file the whole time.
That is the story a fan in Tampa or in Nijmegen should take from this summer: rosters are not fixed by the draft. A quarterback every team in the league had already passed on in April spent the following four months proving a different case in pads. Whether Daniels ever takes a regular season snap for the Buccaneers is still an open question, and how he would hold up against a live NFL pass rush remains untested. That the coaching staff would trust him to try, ahead of a proven veteran they signed for that exact job, is not in question at all.
