Hypothetical Scenario: It’s Sunday, December 29th, 2019, Week 17 of the NFL season. Tampa Bay has the ball with a fourth and goal at the Saints’ nine-yard line, trailing 24-20 with five seconds left.
A touchdown not only secures a win but it puts the Bucs at 10-6 and clinches its first playoff berth since 2007. A loss means no postseason contention for the 12th consecutive season.
This pivotal play in franchise history will begin on the cadence of Jameis Winston. He has started all 16 games and has set career highs in every major statistical category.
With this upcoming play, he’s looking to set his most important, new regular season career high: victories as a starting quarterback. Doing so would finally bust open the post-season door for the fifth-year QB, and once he is in he will finally have the opportunity to be measured among the game’s best.
However, if this pass does not fall into the hands of one of his receivers, or if Jameis does not pull off a game-winning miracle scramble the season, though full of promise, has ended with the same result as those filled with countless failures. Whether this play puts the Bucs in the post-season or not, it is quite evident that Winston has solidified his future in Tampa Bay as long as Bruce Arians is the head coach.
This hypothetical scenario is one that the Bucs have not seen so far in Winston’s career.
Yes, Tampa Bay was close to post-season contention in 2016; however, they were all but mathematically eliminated by the time Week 17 kicked off. Bucs fans can recall the poor prime-time showing at Dallas in Week 15, the following week gave us the Doug Martin drama right before kickoff in Superdome, and that was that.
The city of Tampa is also well aware of just how much turmoil has occurred over the past two years. From off the field distractions to quarterback controversies, coupled with consistently losing games.
The off the field distractions and losing streaks may be real problems, but the quarterback position is one that the organization is wasting their time worrying about.
With any other quarterback that has flashed the brilliance that Winston has, there would be no question as to them being their franchise’s future. It’s hard to recall another quarterback who broke all major franchise records for a quarterback before their 25th birthday and was still not solidly considered their franchise’s quarterback of the future.
In many ways, Jameis has brought that upon himself. Mistakes in his past have crept up like demons ready to amplify any of failures in ways that make it appear as though he has never won an NFL game.
These mistakes have carried on since his days at Florida State. Character flaws and boneheaded decisions that we all thought were behind him crept up again last season when news of an over two-year incident broke and all of the questions about him came back to square one.
It goes without saying that time will tell if Winston is truly the future quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He has stated himself that he has made a conscious effort to grow in every way in his life since his last incident.
With hopefully all the off the field issues officially in his past the argument for him to be the starting quarterback of the future or not should be merely a football decision. In order to prove himself, Winston needs to lead the Buccaneers to may more victories than the six total wins he has led them to in the previous two seasons combined.
The overhaul undertaken by the franchise this month regarding the coaching staff can go a long way to helping Winston and the Bucs accomplish this.
New head coach Bruce Arians is a proven winner with a great reputation for getting the best out of his team. In addition, Arians is a quarterback guru.
He has found great success in the past with NFL quarterbacks like Ben Roethlisberger, Andrew Luck, and Carson Palmer. Here is a look at the success Bruce Arians has had with quarterbacks since 2007, his first season as the offensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers up until his final season as Arizona Cardinals head coach.
As you can see from the tables above, Arians has worked with quarterbacks youthful and experienced with varying degrees of talent and ability.
The hardest part of Arians’s job to turn Winston around is to fix the clear weaknesses presented in his game the past five seasons. A key for Winston’s learning process will be finding ways to limit turnovers. Winston does not need to post Aaron Rodgers-like touchdown-to-interception ratios but, he needs to greatly improve his current numbers to give the team a chance to win games.
Here’s a look at Winston’s 2017 & 2018 stats along with projections for 2019:
The 2019 projected numbers are derived directly from Winston’s previous two seasons.
A slight uptick of .45 percentage points in completion percentage was given in his projection for 2019. His total attempts are strictly based on the average number of passing attempts he took per game over the previous two seasons.
The completions were derived from the slightly adjusted completion percentage. His yards per completion is a direct average from two previous two seasons, which was multiplied by the calculated number of completions to give us a yardage total.
Winston’s projected touchdowns were based on the attempt-to-touchdown ratio of his previous two seasons, then two more added for a projected slight improvement.
The projected interception total was based on the attempt-to-interception ratio of his previous two seasons and reduced by five as Arians should be able to help Winston read his progressions without rushing into making mistakes.
His win total was tripled from the average of his previous two seasons, then one more was added to match Arians’ average number of victories per season as an offensive coordinator and head coach, which happens to be the benchmark to make the playoffs in most years.
By all accounts, the numbers above represent a franchise quarterback in the eyes of many fan bases, especially when factored into the win column.
I would have to say that Winston’s current path leads to a “yes” more so than a “no” when answering the question as to whether he is the Buccaneers’ quarterback of the future.
It is very dependent on 1) his continued growth and maturity off-the-field, 2) leading the team to many more victories, 3) continued growth in production coupled with a significant decrease in interceptions.
This could be considered Winston’s fourth down in Tampa Bay, however, this time the position for the success he is in has put his future in a goal-to-go situation.
