While the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have played their best football over the last half of the season, it still wasn’t enough to get them to the postseason for the first time since 2007.
When they take the field Sunday in their Week 17 finale against the Atlanta Falcons, the Bucs will be watching to see if their quarterback Jameis Winston can make franchise history by becoming the first Buccaneers quarterback (and eighth overall) to throw for 5,000 yards in a single season. Winston needs just 92 more yards to hit that mark. And, with two interceptions, he could make another kind of history — the bad kind — by becoming the first quarterback to throw for 30 touchdowns and 30 interceptions in a season.
The Bucs are planning to bring Winston back next season, but he’ll have to fix his interception problem if he wants to stick around for the long-term.
But, if you ask Rodger Sherman of The Ringer, he doesn’t believe the problem is fixable. Sherman wrote a great in-depth piece about Winston and his seemingly inexplicable statistical season. It’s certainly worth a read, and this little excerpt below from Sherman’s article gives you an idea of why he thinks Winston won’t change.
“There’s no evidence to suggest that Winston will figure this out with time. He had 10 picks as a freshman in college, then 18 as a sophomore. His interception rate went from 2.8 percent as an NFL rookie to 3.2 percent in his second year to 3.7 percent in 2018 to 4.7 percent this season. Quarterbacks should get better at avoiding turnovers as time goes on. Winston is the Benjamin Button of interceptions. There aren’t going to be more players like Winston. He’s a one-of-a-kind anti-star who cloaks his devastating tendency for self-destruction inside of a game that reasonably replicates the things good quarterbacks do. He succeeds often enough that teams might be convinced to let him ruin them.”
If you think, too, that Sherman wrote this piece out of a bias or hatred for Winston, think again. He actually ends his piece by pointing out how much he enjoys watching him.
“As a neutral observer, I love it. Efficient quarterback play has become the standard in the modern NFL. Everybody is chasing the most efficient path to success … except this one guy who seems equally interested in success and failure. I’m just glad it’s not my house exploding.”
Unfortunately, for Bucs fans, it is their house Winston is playing in.
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