Monday night’s loss to the Detroit Lions didn’t just hurt the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the loss column.

In the second quarter, while the Bucs’ offense was stalling, Baker Mayfield tried to take a shot up the seam into (illegally) tight coverage, hoping Mike Evans would come down with it. After riding his back for a step and a half, Lions cornerback Rock Ya-Sin lunged and landed forcefully on Evans, briefly knocking him unconscious and rendering him concussed and with a broken clavicle. The odds he will return before the last couple games of the regular season are slim.

Evans, a future first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, entered the 2025 campaign with an 11-year streak of 1,000-yard seasons. With this critical injury, that streak will effectively come to an end.

A large portion of the fanbase is distraught about that development, but nobody should be. Evans just turned 32 years old, and that streak had to end at some point. It was probably better that injury cut the string, rather than a lack of production.

However, there are also many people out there who are not Bucs fans and have expressed that the 1,000-yard streak does not mean anything, citing a few seasons where he hardly hit the mark and the notion that he has never been the best receiver of any season. That is not what the streak was about.

What will place Evans among the all-time greats is not the fact that he can rip off 200-yard games. It is not his ability to take 80-yard touchdowns to the crib on bubble screens. It is the fact that for his entire career, since the moment he was drafted, he has been there for this Tampa Bay team, doing whatever it takes to win.

He has never been a diva, never complained about his targets and never chastised his quarterback play, even when he was catching passes from a truly atrocious carousel in the mid-2010s. With those bad passers—Josh McKown and Mike Glennon, to name a couple—Evans’ production has never waned. The internet trolls will talk about his 1,001-yard or 1,051-yard seasons, but isn’t a 1,051-yard year with the McKown-Glennon tandem more impressive than 1,500 with someone competent?

For a 6-foot-5 catch-in-traffic guy, Evans’ durability to this point has been an incredible anomaly. Now in his 12th season, this snapped collarbone will be the first injury to sideline him for more than four weeks.

It is poetic that the year the Bucs use a first-round pick to draft a premier receiver—Emeka Egbuka—and seemingly hit on him, Evans’ streak breaks. Egbuka was the Bucs’ first receiver drafted in the first round since Evans himself in 2014.

While Evans’ career is certainly not over yet, it does seem to be a slight changing-of-the-guard year. If his character holds true to what it has been for his entire time as a pro, he will mentor young bucks Egbuka, Tez Johnson, and Jalen McMillan while he recovers, and he will celebrate their wins as they carry the torch for a premier receiving corps.

Hopefully for Bucs fans, Evans will be back to 100% around the time they look to make a deep playoff run. With how Egbuka and the other young pass-catchers on the squad have looked, this group will be a problem when the season is on the line.