Jameis Winston was benched after a four-interception performance, and it’s time for the experiment to end.
If an argument already existed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to move on from Jameis Winston, Sunday was the exclamation point. The former first overall pick and supposed franchise savior threw four interceptions before being benched, another in a long line of crushing disappointments in a career that might soon be closing it’s Tampa chapter.
Winston has the second most interceptions in the league this year, which is already unbelievably bad before you realize he’s played in just four games. It’s not just the number of turnovers Winston has had — which is a significant amount — it’s when they occur that is the true black mark on his potential. He has an uncanny ability to render dozens of throws and hundreds of passing yards in a game utterly meaningless with a handful of cataclysmic mistakes. There’s no middle ground with Winston, he lives on the extreme fringes of what quarterbacks are capable of.
Winston’s fourth pick of the day on Sunday was returned for a touchdown and before any of the Bengals had realized the ball was in the defense’s hands, the Buccaneers were walking off the field. The team had given up, its back broken by Winston’s inability to move the ball downfield and inspire a comeback.
This has become Winston’s on-field legacy.
Rewind the clock to September of last year, when the Buccaneers fell behind to the Vikings and were unable to get any sort of comeback brewing because Winston’s drive-killing interceptions kept sucking the wind out of Tampa’s sails. This came against the backdrop of how Winston was going to take the Bucs to the next level and make them a playoff contender. Instead, the season ended with a 5-11 record and top draft selection. It wasn’t the first time a potential momentum wing had been smothered by Winston’s carelessness, and it wasn’t the last. Winston has always been a shoot-from-the-hip gunslinger, but his mistakes have finally caught up to him and the Bucs have been left with the bill. It’s easy to look at his touchdown-to-interception ratio (which is 74-to-54) and push back on the negativity, but there’s a lot of snake oil in his stats. In addition to those picks, Winston has fumbled the ball 36 times, which puts him in Blake Bortles territory as far as losing the football is concerned. Context with Winston is everything.
One of Winston’s most famous plays was a bumbling backward fumble in the Rose Bowl back in 2015.
Flash forward to Sunday and he made an equally mind-blowing stupid play in against the Bengals.
There are four seasons worth of football development between those two plays and Winston’s needle has barely moved. Franchise quarterbacks do not make the type of mistakes Winston does and they certainly don’t make them after having almost a half-decade to develop at the highest level of their profession.
Many mistakes young quarterbacks make can be attributed to the situations they’re in. The list of quarterbacks who had their potential wasted by a revolving door of coaches and coordinators is too long to list, but Winston is neither young enough to have these mistakes written off nor has he been hindered by a constantly changing system. There has been one coaching change in Tampa since Winston was drafted, and it involved his offensive coordinator getting promoted to head coach.
The system has by no means been perfect, but there’s no play call correction for these kinds of mistakes:
That’s a game in which the Buccaneers lost in overtime to the Brett Hundley-led Packers. If Winston holds that ball and doesn’t give up a turnover, there’s a chance the game is never extended to extra time.
Tampa has crafted its entire offense around Winston’s big play ability and he’s rarely capitalized on it. The team drafted Mike Evans, O.J. Howard, and Chris Godwin specifically to give Winston as many options as possible to succeed. Nothing personifies his failure better than the lack of chemistry with DeSean Jackson, whose only job is to get open downfield and create boom-or-bust opportunities. In a one-score loss to the Patriots last year, Winston left a touchdown on the field when he overthrew Jackson on a wide open deep route. His team lost because Winston was unable to properly use the weapons around him and fans were left clinging to investment in his potential and that things would take a turn for the better. Four weeks later Winston would attempt to eat his own fingers in front of fully grown adults.
All of the failures are compounded by the success Ryan Fitzpatrick had in the same exact offense, up to and including erasing the damage Winston created on Sunday by chasing his four-interception performance with an 18-point comeback in less than half the time.
Winston’s sales pitch was always that the risk of his gunslinging ways would be worth the reward in the end. We’re not yet to the end of his road, but we’ve reached the fork where the risks are starting to pile up and there’s little reward to show for it.