Jameis Winston’s legacy in Tampa a balance of ‘so much good, so much terrible’ (2024)

TAMPA, Fla. — My last interaction with Jameis Winston was fitting.

It was minutes after the Buccaneers’ season ended with Winston throwing an interception on the first play of overtime to lose to the Falcons. Other problems — three missed kicks, late defensive letdowns — contributed to the loss, but a turnover on his last touch wasn’t the closing argument he needed as the Bucs weighed whether to bring him back as their starting quarterback.

Speaking to reporters postgame, Winston said he knew that he had to eliminate turnovers, but that otherwise, “if you look at my numbers, I’m balling.” I mentioned that he had said that many times before about turnovers and asked why he hadn’t been able to limit his mistakes.

“I don’t know. It’s a variety of things,” he said. “Just got to get better. I think that’s the biggest thing. I have to continue to get better. We all have to get better at our craft, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Did he worry, I asked, that the turnovers might be a reason why Tampa Bay wouldn’t bring him back?

“That’s the last thing on my mind,” he said. “I’m focused on how I can get better because I know if I eliminate those, I’m going to be the best. So that’s bar none. You better check your sheet. I eliminate those, I’m going to be the best.”

That was Jameis Winston, unfailingly and supremely confident, fully aware of what he was doing wrong, but also unable to stop those things from happening. For five years, he was always polarizing, the best and the worst at the same time, a familiar pattern of so many touchdowns but also so many interceptions, his negatives ultimately overriding his positives.

“That’s the thing,” the usually supportive, protective Bruce Arians said after that game. “There’s so much good, and there’s so much outright terrible. So we have to weigh that and see what happens.”

Two weeks earlier, it was hard to imagine Tampa Bay not moving forward with Winston. After back-to-back 450-yard games (a first in NFL history) to give the Bucs a four-game winning streak and a 7-7 record, we asked fans how the Bucs should handle Winston moving forward. Some 45 percent said they wanted a long-term extension, and another 42 percent wanted the Bucs to give him the franchise tag — $27 million for one year. Just 7 percent answered “move on with a new QB,” and another 5 percent was still unsure. So at least seven out of eight fans responding said they wanted him back in one form or another.

Winston had a pick-six on his first throw of the next game and a second interception on the next drive, ending up with four interceptions in a home loss to the Texans. Then two more picks against the Falcons, including the season-ender in overtime, and Winston finished the year with 30 interceptions, the most by any NFL quarterback in 31 years.

The doubt of those two games, the regression at a point when Arians was looking for end-of-season improvement from his quarterback, opened a window for Tampa Bay to look and see what was behind Door No. 2. That set up the unlikely pursuit of Tom Brady, an unbelievable signing that has made the Bucs one of the most talked-about teams of the offseason, with optimism, excitement and heightened expectations of a return to the playoffs for the first time since 2007.

All this after a season in which Winston led the NFL with 5,109 passing yards and set a team record with 33 touchdown passes. For all the promise and potential still left in a 26-year-old quarterback, he not only wasn’t the Bucs’ choice but went unsigned in free agency for more than five weeks. Openings for starting jobs were filled, and he and another former No. 1 overall pick, Carolina’s Cam Newton, both had to wait until after the draft to find the best backup options.

Instead of $27 million a year, Winston is likely looking at a third of that. He’s finalizing a deal to join the division-rival New Orleans Saints, a team with a fully entrenched starter in Drew Brees. His hopes of getting on the field in 2020 will hinge entirely on Brees getting injured. It’s far from optimal for Winston, though that path did see Teddy Bridgewater go 5-0 filling in for Brees last year, which got him $60 million over three years in a free-agent deal with Carolina.

What went wrong with Winston? There’s a telling scene from HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” filmed during training camp and the 2017 preseason, when the optimism around Winston was at a peak. The Bucs had gone 9-7 in 2016, missing the playoffs only by a tiebreaker, and there was every expectation that the team was improving and about to take that final step to reach the postseason under coach Dirk Koetter.

New video by HBO: Hard Knocks: Ep. 1 Clip – Dirk Koetter Discusses Expectations with Jameis Winston (HBO) https://t.co/AhDTAIXiy2

— Jason Rosenberg (@JROSENBERG1) August 9, 2017

Koetter was in his office, talking to Winston about how he didn’t have to do so much himself to win and how he should perhaps take fewer risks. Winston said he wanted to have “a good understanding of how much is doing too much.”

“Maybe we’ve got to cut our risk a little bit,” Koetter says. “Your M.O. in your career was you’ve always been a risk-taker, even if it got you in trouble early in a game. Either you’ve been good enough, or your team’s been good enough, to bail you out of it. Now we have a good team, by far the best team since you’ve been in the NFL. And you are a guy that’s able to win a game. But you are also … we don’t need you to lose a game for us. You’re the only guy that can really lose a game for us because no one else touches the ball enough. So there’s a fine line there (laughing). You’re a great competitor, but we’ve got to get some patience in there. Now we need you to be a great quarterback.”

Then Koetter gets almost prescient of a future that goes beyond the struggles that would follow in back-to-back 5-11 seasons, beyond his own firing.

“You play a different style of quarterback than Tom Brady,” Koetter tells him. “You play a closer style to Aaron Rodgers. Both great quarterbacks. Both guys will be in the Hall of Fame. Now it’s time, even though they’ve got years on you, you’ve got to play like that because, shoot, that’s just the way this league is.”

Winston never took that step forward. The Bucs were 2-1 to start 2017, then took a close loss to Brady and the Patriots, then fell behind 31-0 against Arizona and Arians, Winston suffering a shoulder injury that would limit him for weeks and then sideline him for three games. The next season started with a three-game suspension for a 2016 incident in Arizona where an NFL investigation determined he groped a female Uber driver, something for which he wasn’t criminally charged but agreed to settle a civil lawsuit.

The suspension gave Ryan Fitzpatrick a window to open the year with three straight 400-yard games and wins over the Saints and Eagles. Winston got his starting job back, but when he threw four interceptions in a bad loss at Cincinnati that dropped the Bucs to 3-4, Koetter benched him for Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick eventually threw enough interceptions himself to give the job back to Winston, and he looked to take a step forward in the final six games, throwing 11 touchdowns against only three interceptions.

The Bucs were 5-11 for a second straight year, though, and Koetter was fired. That brought in Arians, who went all-in with Winston, supporting him from the outset, saying he was part of the reason he came out of retirement to coach the Bucs. Five games in, the Bucs were 2-3, but Winston had five total turnovers in those games. Perhaps he had solved the problems from his first four seasons.

Then the wheels came off in London, with an interception on the first throw and six total turnovers in a lopsided 37-26 loss. The Bucs struggled on defense in their 2-6 start, and Winston continued to struggle with turnovers — four in a close loss to the Titans and another five in a loss to the Saints. With his job on the line, Winston and the Bucs got it together in easy wins over the Falcons and Jaguars, then he had back-to-back games with four touchdown passes and 450-plus yards to beat the Colts and Lions. Then he had those two final bad games, ultimately the last straw in the Bucs’ decision to move on.

That the Bucs would move on from Winston, especially for a chance to win with Brady, isn’t all that surprising. For all the yards and touchdowns, for all the highlight throws, Arians also saw 35 turnovers from his quarterback in a year where he thought his team could make the playoffs. Even in celebrating a new draft class Saturday night, Arians couldn’t help but bring up last year’s team falling short of his expectations.

“Everybody that left our locker room in that last meeting knew we should have been playing in the playoffs, and we beat ourselves,” Arians said. “And if we could correct the turnover ratio, we’d have a chance. So yeah, I think everybody (on our team) that walks in our building is expecting to win.”

Tampa Bay’s struggles were hardly limited to Winston. Since his rookie year in 2015, when Doug Martin finished second in the league in rushing, the Bucs have struggled to run the ball consistently. They’ve averaged fewer than 100 rushing yards a game for three years in a row, the first time they’ve done that since 1996, at the end of a 14-year streak of losing seasons. The Bucs’ defenses were never great and rarely even average, struggling especially against the pass before finally taking an encouraging step forward in the second half of 2019.

Winston was polarizing in Tampa even before he was drafted, given the benefit of the doubt by loyal FSU fans and the opposite from their Gators counterparts. Many fans looked past the rape allegation against him in college, while others were never comfortable cheering for him as part of their team. To his credit, Winston was committed to helping the Tampa community, active in schools and setting up “Dream Room” learning centers in elementary schools that will have his pictures on the wall long after he’s done playing in the NFL. He has never stopped working to help kids back in his Alabama hometown.

Tampa Bay saw Winston get engaged (and this spring, married) to his high school sweetheart, saw him find the joy of fatherhood in the last two years. From the start, he has carried the heavy burden of being a No. 1 overall draft pick, which means he can be 26 and own the Bucs’ career passing records for yards and touchdowns and also rightfully be considered a disappointment in all that.

The arrival of Brady with his six Super Bowl rings and the bonus addition of a Hall of Fame tight end in fellow ex-Patriot Rob Gronkowski — those are things that could obscure and even dwarf what most quarterbacks did before them. Winston came to Tampa with a single loss in his college career, with a Heisman Trophy and a national championship, and he leaves with a humbling 28-42 record, some of those losses despite him but some, too, because of him.

He has been succeeded by arguably the most successful quarterback in NFL history, which will make it harder to ponder what might have been. Had the Bucs replaced him with, say, Teddy Bridgewater, it would be easier to fairly compare what one quarterback can do with a team to another.

Check his stat sheet, and you’ll find 121 touchdowns and 19,737 yards, two marks that will likely be atop the Bucs’ record books for at least another decade. There were also countless turnovers, his career bookended with pick-sixes on his very first and very last passes. His time in Tampa wasn’t as decorated as Gerald McCoy’s, but both suffered as high draft picks with high expectations, as longtime captains who — fairly or unfairly — weren’t good enough to carry a team to the playoffs. Both are now moving on to division rivals as sudden enemies of the team they’d been synonymous with, and there’s a good chance that Winston, like McCoy, might move on to an entirely different team after only one year there.

The Bucs’ long, sad history with quarterbacks has seen several move on to greatness only after they leave town. Steve Young had almost twice as many interceptions as touchdowns in Tampa and, of course, made seven straight Pro Bowls with San Francisco. He threw six touchdowns in a Super Bowl win, just as Doug Williams, after leaving the Bucs, threw four touchdowns to win a Super Bowl with the Redskins. Even Trent Dilfer managed to get a ring with Baltimore after struggling with Tampa Bay.

Will Winston join that list? Could the Bucs possibly come to regret bringing in a six-time Super Bowl champion instead of giving Winston another season to turn things around?

For five years, Bucs fans saw the good and bad of Winston, often within the same game — elation and frustration so frequently and awkwardly bundled as one. His personal legacy is still to be written, albeit elsewhere, and history shows that will go a long way toward how his time in Tampa will be remembered: either as another great that got away or as someone else first challenged to be the very best in his draft class and later guilty of not being as good as the best ever.

(Top photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)