KEEPING QB WINSTON IN THE FOLD KEY TO BUCS’ LONG-TERM SUCCESS
Troubled pivot rewards head coach’s faith with record-setting effort against Lions
Of NFL teams already or effectively eliminated from playoff contention, the ones that tend to fight hardest down the stretch are those with new — or nearly new — head coaches.
That’s because those coaches, if they’re any good, aren’t on the hot seat yet. Thus, hope for the future still takes deep breaths in their locker rooms. Thus, coach and player alike are still battling to create positive results, good impressions, and momentum to carry into the next year.
One of the best examples in recent seasons is this year’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The Bucs, you might not have realized, improved to .500 on the season (7-7) with Sunday’s win in Detroit. Tampa Bay has won four in a row, and five of six, after opening the season 2-6. With two home games to close out the season — against 9-5 Houston and 5-9 Atlanta — an 8-8 or even a 9-7 finish isn’t out of the question for the Bucs.
And so, with the remaining two NFL weekends this year mostly about playoff positioning for the best teams that already have clinched a post-season berth, rather than about the usual complicated scenarios involving a crush of teams hoping to sneak into the post-season somehow, let’s take a look at how one team — one that long has been out of the playoff hunt — has managed to stay focused on constructing the proper foundational forms on which future successes might be built.
Quarterback Jameis Winston remains the most compelling, if not greatest, Bucs player.
He set an NFL record Sunday with his second consecutive game with at least 450 passing yards. Winston seems to keep inching closer toward being able to figure out how to sift through the disastrous gaffes from his otherwise impressive, prolific repertoire of quarterbacking skills.
It’s paramount that he does so. He’s not there yet, however, near the end of Year 5 in the NFL.
Winston passed for 458 yards and four touchdowns against the Lions, seven days after passing for 456 and four touchdowns against Indianapolis. But he also threw four interceptions combined in those games.
Only three months from now, the Buccaneers must decide whether to let Winston move on as a free agent, or re-sign him.
Buccaneers first-year head coach Bruce Arians has talked up Winston this year, even during that early tough stretch when it appeared the 2015 No. 1 overall draft pick was beyond repair.
Keeping Winston around on a lucrative but short-term deal might make the most sense for both the Bucs and Winston.
“Any time that you start a sentence that says, ‘In the history of the NFL …’ it’s big,” Arians said at his Monday news conference. “And for Jameis, I’m really, really happy for us, and for him, to be able to put his name in the record books like that.”
Know that Winston set this yardage record with a fractured thumb on his throwing hand, suffered before halftime a week ago against the Colts. Arians suggested a special brace and glove on Winston’s throwing hand helped him grip the ball better. Arians cleared him to play in Detroit during last Friday’s practice.
“That fact that he wanted to play speaks volumes of him,” Arians said.
“I think there is discomfort. I don’t know how much pain. He got used to the glove real quick.”
For his part, Winston said at his post-game news conference on Sunday that “squeezing,” for the time being, “is always going to hurt … but it’s not about me.”
To make that point, Winston added: “We’re low on receivers right now.”
Sure enough. Winston set the record without his favourite and most dangerous wide receiver, Mike Evans, and also after having lost two other starting receivers (Chris Godwin and Scott Miller) during the game in Detroit — and to the same injury as Evans, a bad hamstring pull.
That the Bucs continue to play as though they’re in the thick of the hunt is a credit to Arians and what even he probably would call his no-bulls--t attitude.
If a guy gets hurt? It’s not just next-man-up under Arians. It’s “next man up cannot become a weak link in the chain.”
“The level of expectation doesn’t change,” Arian said. “Get out there and do something to help us win the game.”
And he probably says it exactly like that — with a few cuss words thrown in — to players he thrusts into unexpected playing time.
“It just shows what we’re capable of when we play good football,” Winston said of receivers who stepped in and were productive down the stretch to beat the Lions.
“That’s what we’re striving to do every week is play good football. We don’t have to play perfect, we don’t have to play phenomenal. We just have to play good football and we’ll find a way.”
To keep the Bucs’ momentum churning into next year, it’s probably true that just as many keen observers as not would argue that getting rid of Winston would help the cause most.
For his part, the unabashedly openly religious Winston said he doesn’t want to relocate anywhere in 2020.
“I hope I helped myself, because I definitely want to be here in Tampa. But we’ve just got to finish strong, and that’s all that we can focus on is week to week, just finish strong.”
Arians very much sounds like a man capable of getting a locker-room of 50-plus players focused, prepared and motivated to keep on putting out for two more weeks. And beyond.
“We’re trying to finish out on a very, very positive note,” Arians said. “And with all the guys that had to step up in this (win at Detroit), especially offensively, it means a ton.”
Apparently, Josh Gordon just can’t stay away from the stuff. Whatever the stuff is.
This time, it’s lots of bad stuff. The chronically punished wide receiver, currently with the Seattle Seahawks, was suspended indefinitely without pay by the league on Monday for violating separate policies against performing-enhancing substances and substances of abuse.
Typically, a suspension is levied for violation of just one policy or the other.
It is Gordon’s fifth substance-abuse suspension and sixth overall in eight years in the NFL.