Jameis Winston Is a Human Highlight Reel, But That's Not Enough for the Bucs

Every NFL preseason, I try to sit down and envision my most optimistic scenario for each team. Sometimes this involves a lot of reaching. "Perhaps the Browns could finish 8-8 if Robert Griffin III stumbles into a time machine and every other quarterback in the division gets hurt again," for example.

But for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, my best-case scenario was pretty simple: Jameis Winston elevates his game and the Bucs ride a weak division into a playoff spot ahead of schedule.

Winston opened the 2015 season with a memorable meltdown against the Tennessee Titans, sparking a thousand hot takes about him and fellow rookie quarterback Marcus Mariota, but he showed a fair amount of promise for the rest of the campaign. In particular, he was capable of utterly ridiculous throws—no rookie outside of Andrew Luck has been able to match his ability to deliver on-point deep balls on the run or under pressure.

Winston's problems that first season were pretty simple to diagnose: he turned the ball over way too much, and displayed a notable lack of accuracy on a down-to-down basis. Per Cian Fahey's 2016 Quarterback Catalogue, Winston threw the fourth most interceptable passes of any starting quarterback last year, and paired it with the lowest accuracy percentage. (Note that accuracy and completions don't go exactly hand-and-hand in Fahey's charting.)

The hope among Bucs fans was that a full offseason of Winston concentrating on football (as opposed to playing baseball, which he did at Florida State University) would spark his development. NFL general managers and personnel people will often tell you that a player's first real offseason in the league is the make-or-break one. And given how sloppy Winston's footwork and mechanics were, there was a lot of room for improvement in his second season.

So far, it doesn't look like that has happened. Winston's first two games were a decided mix of good (against the Falcons' putrid defense in Week 1) and bad (against a more formidable Cardinals front the following Sunday). Through two weeks, Winston ranks 28th out of 34 qualifying quarterbacks in Football Outsiders' DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average), which measures how effective a passer is given the offense around him on a pass-by-pass basis.

To truly evaluate Winston as a player, though, requires a bit more context. For one thing, he doesn't have much weaponry to work with. In building the roster, Tampa general manager Jason Licht has focused heavily on trait-based scouting: he loves size and speed, which usually comes with an ability to win at the catch point. Wide receiver Mike Evans, the Bucs' No. 7 overall pick in 2014, has delivered on that front, but Tampa's other receivers just aren't impressive at this point of their careers.

Big free-agent signing of yesteryear Vincent Jackson is coming off a knee injury; he has looked out of sync with the offense on multiple routes this season and has not held on to contested catches or demonstrated much enthusiasm to dive for balls yet. The third-receiver candidates are led by Adam Humphries, who literally won his roster spot through tryout camp and gets bumped off his route any time he's dealt contact. Austin Sefarian-Jenkins, the monster tight end from Washington, should be right up there with Evans, but between injuries and clashes with the coaching staff, he's barely a bit player. Outside of Evans and Charles Sims in the backfield, the Bucs are lacking difference-makers.

And because of the play designs in Tampa, which are built around winning at the catch point, Winston is always going to have a slightly inflated interception total. He doesn't get the quantity of easy throws that, say, an Andy Dalton gets, because Tampa doesn't have many receivers who can leave three would-be tacklers holding their jocks. The offense is designed to win the hard way, and Winston has the arm to deliver on that, but the receivers aren't holding up their end of the bargain.

And the offensive line? Well, let's watch them teach us how not to block a stunt:

Left tackle Donovan Smith was one of the worst pass blockers in the NFL last season, and while he fared okay against Atlanta's abysmal pass rush in Week 1, he was abused by the Cardinals and star edge rusher Chandler Jones in Week 2. Tampa's line forces a fair share of dumpoffs and startled attempts on Winston. While Winston has enough intuitive playmaking ability to be able to win outside of the normal process of the snap, that's not the way that Tampa should want him to play. The Tampa offensive line isn't as bad as it was last year, when Gosder Cherilus was inviting edge rushers into Winston's line of sight regularly, but they're also not actively helping.

So Winston hasn't been handed the ideal work environment as a quarterback. But to reach the upper echelon of his skill set, he simply must develop better accuracy. That's what has been lacking, and that's mostly on him. I'm not talking about an inability to hit pinpoint throws, and I'm not saying there are particular throws that pose problems for Winston. This is more of a lurking issue behind every throw: the chance that he airmails it. There were inklings of this in his college tape, but college defenses didn't put the same kind of pressure on Winston that NFL teams have.

For instance, take a look at this scorcher over Jackson's head in Week 2:

I dinged Jackson earlier for being out of sync with this offense, but he would've needed to be Gheorghe Muresan to catch this ball. There wasn't an inordinate amount of pressure. This wasn't poor play design. This is just a flat-out flubbed ball. The problem isn't that this happens to Winston; it's that it happens far too often. This isn't a twice-a-game thing. It's a twice-a-quarter thing.

The elephant in the room regarding the poor accuracy is Winston's footwork. He routinely double-clutches and throws off his back foot. I tend to give quarterbacks a lot of leeway on mechanical evaluations, because I don't care how that sausage is made as long as the end results are good. Nobody would point to Philip Rivers, for instance, as an example of textbook form, but he's used his sidearm release to drop ball after ball in the bucket on a nine-route. Quarterbacks win because of their unique strengths—be it pre-snap adjustments, pocket mobility, the ability to create big plays out of structure, or just a cannon arm—not because they stand right and walk tall. We'd have a league full of Kyle Bollers if mechanics were all that mattered. In Winston's case, though, it's like his feet and his brain are on different pages of the same book for some reads. He's not necessarily that his reads are wrong, but his disjointed reaction to them leads to the ball coming out wonky.

What makes Winston so fascinating is how many different boxes he can check as a quarterback. He doesn't have a cannon but his arm strength is very good. He deals with pressure well, he reads pre-snap well, and he's a good anticipation passer. If all you watch is highlight reels, he's got one of the most impressive of any quarterback right now. There's no throw he can't make. And given how little help he gets from his teammates, every snap becomes an underdog saga. It's a compelling watch. But right now, Winston's mechanical and accuracy issues mean that there's also no throw he can't turn into a wormburner.

There are plenty of highly drafted quarterbacks who took time to reach their full potential on the field. Eli Manning was an interception machine until his fifth season, when he became more comfortable in the flow of an offense. Matt Stafford had an awful rookie season in 2009, got hurt in the midst of what looked like a great second year, and dominated in 2011. It's hard to say for sure what changed from the outside. Quarterback development is one of the NFL's biggest black boxes: players go in, sound bites and on-field results come out, and we're left to figure out what happened.

Winston certainly has every tool to become a star, and this is far from the end of his development. But my first impression of him in 2016 is that not enough has changed from 2015 for him to be the kind of quarterback that takes Tampa to the playoffs—at least, not this year.

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.