Mike Evans scored his first touchdown in someone else's colors

For twelve seasons, a touchdown catch by Mike Evans meant pewter and red. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, it meant the red and gold of the San Francisco 49ers. Evans caught a 2-yard pass from Brock Purdy early in the third quarter of the 49ers' 27-7 win over the Los Angeles Rams, his first regular season touchdown that Tampa Bay had no part of. For a lot of fans in Europe who built their whole idea of the Buccaneers around the No. 13 jersey, that image, and it was an image most of us only saw on a phone screen in the small hours, 2:35 AM CEST on Friday morning, Thursday night in the US and Friday morning in Melbourne, was the moment the 2026 season actually started to feel real.

BucsWorld told the story of the man who stayed in Chris Godwin is now the last man standing from the old Bucs core. This is the story of the one who left, and why his first score for somebody else lands differently than any of the 108 he scored for Tampa Bay.

What happened in Melbourne

The NFL opened its 2026 season across two continents in the same week. The Buccaneers do not play until Sunday, against the Cincinnati Bengals, but the league's first game of the year, on Thursday, sent the 49ers and Rams to Australia for the first regular season game ever played there. A crowd of 100,021 packed the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the seventh largest regular season crowd in NFL history, to watch San Francisco win comfortably, 27-7.

Evans caught six of his seven targets for 49 yards. The touchdown came with 11:03 left in the third quarter: a 2-yard pass from Purdy that put the 49ers up 17-7, a lead they never gave back. It was a small play by the standards of Evans' career, two yards rather than one of the contested deep balls that made him famous in Tampa. But it did something no game in his career had done before. It extended his streak of consecutive seasons with a touchdown catch to 13, tying tight end Zach Ertz for the longest active streak in the NFL, and it did it in a uniform nobody outside Evans' own household had ever pictured him wearing.

Demarcus Robinson and Deebo Samuel also caught touchdown passes from Purdy, who finished 25 of 34 for 205 yards and three touchdowns. For Bucs fans searching for a silver lining, there was not much of one in the box score: San Francisco looked like a complete team on a night meant to showcase the league to a new continent, and Evans looked like exactly what the 49ers paid for.

Head coach Kyle Shanahan, who spent years game-planning around Evans as an opposing coordinator in Atlanta before ever coaching him, did not sound surprised afterward. "Mike is as good as any receiver who's played down there," Shanahan said of Evans after the win, adding that the touchdown connection with Purdy had been building since the two worked out together in the offseason. For a coach who had spent a decade trying to stop Evans from the opposite sideline, watching him beat a defender for a score in his own uniform was, in its own quiet way, a changing of the guard.

How and why he left

Evans signed with San Francisco in March 2026, a three-year contract worth $42.4 million, up to $60.4 million with incentives, with $16.3 million in total guarantees and $14.3 million of that at signing. It was, by NFL standards, a modest guarantee for a player of Evans' resume, a structure that reflected both his age, 33 that August, and a 2025 season cut short by a hamstring injury and a broken collarbone that limited him to 30 catches, 368 yards and 3 touchdowns, his least productive year as a professional.

The money was never really the story. "The money was not the biggest factor for me," Evans said, as quoted by ESPN; his representative told the same outlet he could have signed for more elsewhere. The Buccaneers, for their part, acknowledged they could not meet the price San Francisco offered given the rest of the roster they needed to build, and said as much in a statement thanking Evans for twelve years and pointing toward a future Ring of Honor induction. Evans himself framed the move around opportunity: a chance to play for a contender, and for a quarterback he was excited about in Purdy.

There was a smaller, stranger marker of the split, too. Evans wore No. 13 for all twelve seasons in Tampa, and for his college career at Texas A&M before that. In San Francisco, the number belongs to Purdy. Evans is wearing No. 5 instead, the number he wore in high school in Galveston, Texas, long before either uniform. A jersey number sounds like trivia. For a receiver who built an entire personal brand, a foundation, a decade of merchandise, around one number, it is a small daily reminder that the old identity does not travel with him.

The numbers he leaves behind

However the 2026 season goes for Evans in San Francisco, the numbers he built in Tampa Bay are not going anywhere. He leaves as the Buccaneers' all-time leader in every meaningful receiving category: 866 receptions, 13,052 receiving yards, and 108 receiving touchdowns, each a franchise record, built across twelve seasons from 2014 through 2025. He is the only player in NFL history to open a career with 11 consecutive 1,000-yard receiving seasons, a streak that ended only when the 2025 injuries caught up with him, and one that ties him to Jerry Rice as the only two receivers to put together a run that long. His 108 touchdowns rank tenth in NFL history, and he is one of ten players ever with 13,000 receiving yards and 100 touchdowns; the other nine are in the Hall of Fame.

Those numbers were not built in a vacuum. Evans arrived in Tampa Bay in the 2014 draft into a franchise that had not made the playoffs since 2007, and he was still there in February 2021 when the Buccaneers beat the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV, the second championship in franchise history and the only one most of Europe's Bucs fans were alive and following football to see live. He played under four head coaches, two different franchise quarterbacks in his final stretch alone, and a rebuild that turned Tampa Bay from an afterthought into a team with its own following from Germany to the Philippines. For most of that run, if the Buccaneers were on television in Europe at 1:00 AM local time, Evans was usually the reason a highlight was worth staying up for.

What his absence changes now

Evans' departure did not just leave a hole in the record book. It reshaped an entire position group that BucsWorld examined in detail in Life after Mike Evans: who catches the 1,000 yards now. Chris Godwin, the only player left from that old core, now carries the label of the room's most experienced receiver for the first time in his career, after years of playing the complementary role to Evans rather than the lead one. Second-year receiver Emeka Egbuka, who caught 63 passes for 938 yards as a rookie in 2025, is the player with a real shot at inheriting the 1,000-yard workload Evans owned for over a decade, not because the team has anointed him the next Evans, but because he is the healthiest proven option in the building. Jalen McMillan, returning from a broken neck, is the swing factor who decides whether that becomes a two man operation or a genuine three man rotation.

None of them are being asked to be Evans. That framing, replacing a legend one for one, rarely works in the NFL, and Tampa Bay's coaching staff has talked instead about spreading the workload across a younger, more crowded room. It is a sensible plan. It is also, inescapably, a smaller plan than the one built around a single receiver who caught a thousand yards a year for over a decade.

Why it matters to a fan watching from Europe

There is a particular kind of loyalty a European Buccaneers fan develops for one player, because so much of the relationship with this team was built through him. Plenty of fans in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and beyond did not discover the Buccaneers through a hometown connection or a family tradition. They discovered them through a highlight reel, a jump ball won in the corner of an end zone at an hour when reasonable people are asleep, and for a huge number of those fans across the 2010s and early 2020s, the player making that catch was wearing No. 13. Watching him make that same kind of catch for someone else, in a stadium on the other side of the world from both Tampa and Amsterdam, is a strange kind of full circle.

Tampa Bay let him go with thanks rather than anger, a statement from the club and a Ring of Honor promise. He gave the Buccaneers twelve years, a Super Bowl, and every meaningful receiving record the franchise has. What Thursday night in Melbourne made clear is simpler and a little sadder than any argument about money or fit: the record book stays in Tampa, but the player it was built by has moved on, and Sunday in Cincinnati, for the first time in over a decade, the Buccaneers will take the field without him.