Zac Robinson's offense, explained: what the new coordinator brings to Tampa Bay

Baker Mayfield is entering his ninth NFL season and his fifth different offensive coordinator in five years in Tampa Bay alone. Byron Leftwich, Dave Canales, Liam Coen, Josh Grizzard, and now Zac Robinson, hired on January 22, 2026, after Grizzard was let go following a single season. Most starting quarterbacks never deal with that kind of churn. Mayfield has now done it every year since he arrived.

What makes Robinson different is not that he is new. It is that he arrives with an actual pedigree and, by his own admission, an identity he wants this offense to have.

Who is Zac Robinson

Robinson spent 2019 through 2023 on the Los Angeles Rams' offensive staff under Sean McVay, working his way from assistant quarterbacks coach up to pass game coordinator and quarterbacks coach by 2022 and 2023. He was on that staff when the Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals in Super Bowl LVI following the 2021 season.

From there, Robinson became the Atlanta Falcons' offensive coordinator for the 2024 and 2025 seasons under head coach Raheem Morris. Both years ended 8-9 and out of the playoffs, but the offense itself had real talent and real moments: Kirk Cousins threw for a franchise-record 509 yards against Tampa Bay in Week 5 of 2024, and running back Bijan Robinson developed into one of the league's best all-purpose backs, rushing for 170 yards and an 81-yard touchdown against Buffalo in Week 6 of 2025 on his way to All-Pro honors. Michael Penix Jr. took over at quarterback late in 2024 and shared the job with Cousins again in 2025.

That is a coach who has spent his entire career around one of the league's more copied offensive families, then had two years running his own version of it with a genuine three-way weapon in Bijan Robinson and a talented but inconsistent quarterback situation. Now he gets a full-time starter with a track record of a 41-touchdown season.

The scheme he says he is installing

Robinson has been open about the plan in a way Bucs fans have not always gotten from past coordinators. He has described the offense as a "spread" system built to "use all of the receivers, tight ends and running backs to create an advantage," rather than funneling the ball through one dominant target the way Tampa Bay could with Mike Evans on the boundary for over a decade.

The headline structural change is a wide zone running scheme (a run play where the offensive line blocks laterally toward the play side, asking backs to read the defense and cut upfield wherever the running lane opens, rather than the ball simply going to a pre-called gap). It is a staple of the Shanahan-McVay coaching family that Robinson comes from, and it rewards backs with vision and burst more than pure straight-line power, which fits Bucky Irving's game well.

Analyst Jon Gruden, breaking down the hire for JoeBucsFan, pointed to more use of 12 personnel (a personnel grouping that means one running back and two tight ends on the field, as opposed to the more common 11 personnel with one back and three receivers), plus more shotgun and pistol formations. He also noted that Robinson's terminology overlaps with what Liam Coen ran in Tampa in 2024, which should shorten the learning curve for veterans who have already played in a scheme from the same coaching tree.

By Robinson's own account in mid-camp, the offense was roughly 85 percent installed with about a 50-50 split between brand-new concepts and carryover from previous Tampa systems. Godwin and Mayfield both independently described it in similar terms: familiar in parts, new in others, not a total teardown.

Built around what Mayfield does well

Robinson has said directly that he is tailoring the scheme to Mayfield rather than importing a fixed system and hoping the quarterback adapts to it. He has pointed specifically to Mayfield's ability to throw accurately while moving, calling him "probably the best in the league throwing on the run," and has talked about expanding the "keeper game" and "boot game" (bootleg plays, where the quarterback fakes a handoff and rolls out of the pocket to one side, buying time and opening up throwing lanes off the play-action fake) to take advantage of it.

That points to more play-action than Tampa Bay has necessarily leaned on before (a passing play that starts by faking a handoff to the running back, designed to freeze the defense's linebackers and safeties for a beat before the quarterback throws), paired with more under-center snaps than the shotgun-heavy passing offenses the league trended toward over the last decade. It is a deliberate bet that Mayfield's mobility and improvisational instincts, the traits that make him dangerous outside a clean pocket, are worth building the running game and the play-action package around, rather than defaulting to a spread-it-and-throw-it operation every down.

How it differs from the Grizzard offense

Josh Grizzard's 2025 offense lasted one season and ended with Mayfield's completion percentage falling from 71.4 percent in 2024 to 63.2 percent, and his touchdown total dropping from 41 to 26. Beat reporters and the coaching staff have not pointed to one single scheme flaw behind that drop, and a battered offensive line, Cody Mauch's knee injury chief among the issues, took plenty of the blame independent of play-calling.

What is clear is that Robinson has been explicit about wanting the offense to have "some sort of identity," a phrasing that reads, deliberately or not, as a contrast with a one-year system that never got the chance to establish one. The wide zone run game, the added 12 personnel, and the play-action-and-boot package built for Mayfield are the concrete pieces of that identity as camp and the preseason wound down.

An uneven first look

The preseason evidence has been genuinely mixed. Tampa Bay's offense produced only 87 total yards in one preseason outing against Kansas City and managed just 12 yards on its first 11 plays in the finale against Jacksonville, numbers that alarmed some beat writers watching camp. It is worth remembering that preseason snaps go disproportionately to backups and half-installed game plans, and the Buccaneers still finished the preseason 2-1. But it means the clean version of this offense, the one Robinson has been describing since January, has not yet shown up in a game that counted.

What it means for the skill players

For Baker Mayfield, this is the first offense in his Tampa tenure explicitly built to let him move and improvise rather than operate strictly from the pocket, which should suit a player who set career highs on a very different design in 2024 and then regressed under Grizzard in 2025.

For Bucky Irving, a wide zone scheme is close to the ideal fit after a 2024 rookie year in which he rushed for 1,122 yards, the first Tampa Bay rookie to top 1,000 since Doug Martin in 2012, before a shoulder and ankle-shortened 2025 in which he managed 588 yards on 173 carries in 10 games. It is a make-or-break year for him by reputation alone, and the scheme change works in his favor rather than against it.

For Emeka Egbuka and Chris Godwin, a "use everyone" spread system is exactly the kind of offense a team without one clear number-one receiver wants to run, spreading the target load across multiple bodies rather than forcing a single replacement for Evans to emerge overnight.

For the tight ends, more 12 personnel is a direct vote of confidence in a room led by Cade Otton, who caught 59 passes in both 2024 and 2025, and Ko Kieft, alongside rookie Bauer Sharp. If Robinson follows through on the personnel shift he has described, this could be the most tight-end-involved Tampa Bay offense in years.

None of it is proven yet. Installing a scheme in the spring and summer is different from executing it against a real opponent's real defense, and the preseason gave Bucs fans more reason for caution than confidence. What Robinson has given the building, at minimum, is a stated plan with actual specifics behind it, something the previous four-coordinators-in-four-years era rarely afforded anyone watching from outside the building.