All-Twenty Tuesday: Bucs QB Jameis Winston

This week I wanted to highlight the play of quarterback Jameis Winston – and for the right reasons this time!

Winston finished the game against the 49ers completing 29-of-38 passes with 312 passing yards, two passing touchdowns and zero interceptions. It was a good game for Winston.

Bucs head coach Dirk Koetter said after the game that decisiveness is what made the difference with Winston this week.

Let’s look at what that meant.

The first example I saw of Winston making the right decisions came in the first series of the game.

In the play above, Winston hit Adam Humphries for a decent gain, but it was the context around it that I liked. There was a route combination to manipulate the zone coverage on this play. You can see Humphries do his little curl route, but if you’ll notice, Cameron Brate is doing a corner route behind him. This forces the outside zone player to choose between taking Brate or coming down on Humphries.

With Humphries being the easier throw, Winston was able to read that and hit him for a nice gain. Winston didn’t take the chance or wait too long to see if Brate’s route would develop. He saw the yards and took them. That’s the correct play for moving the ball efficiently.

On the next play above, Winston did a good job of recognizing after the snap that there was one defender (the linebacker) there to guard two potential options: the running back and the tight end, which were on the same side.

At the snap, Winston saw that the safety over the left defensive end dropped back into a two-high look instead of taking the tight end. That meant that it was zone coverage and not man coverage. After he figured that out, Winston quickly knew where his best option was going to be, and that was with Barber on the swing pass. The pump fake was likely because he wasn’t sure if the defensive end was going to get his hand up to block it, not because he had hesitation in where to go with the ball.

These last two plays aren’t revolutionary things that Winston has never done before, but him doing them with regularity is what can make the difference moving forward. This was the way he was supposed to play versus an inferior opponent.

Little confidence leads to big confidence.

Winston’s pass down the sideline to Mike Evans was in perfect timing, and it was recognizable from the start. Winston saw that his guy had one-on-one coverage and gave it the green light right away. Do you want this ball to be a little more towards the field for Evans to run under it and score the touchdown? Of course. But it was a good throw regardless.

I did a little explanation of it in the clip above, but the sack Winston took in the first quarter was actually a good play.

You can listen to the explanation in the clip above for greater detail, but Winston not taking the chance there is him living to fight another down. It was first down, the team had the lead and they were throwing from within their own 20-yard line. Winston made the right decision to take the sack. That shows improvement on his part. Not every throw is there to attempt.

Now maybe he can take that and learn to throw the ball away…

But all of that is not to say there weren’t a few “vintage Jameis” moments.

In the clip above, Winston did what Winston does, going against the grain, avoiding pressure, throwing over the middle and finding a guy that was only open because the defense thought “there’s no way he’d throw the ball over there.”

He did.

It worked.

All in all, it was a game that Winston played very well. It was the kind of game plan that you need to have against teams that aren’t as good as you. You need to control the ball while still being able to throw, and that means being decisive in your decisions and getting the ball to where it needs to go to move the chains best – while still through the air.

Winston won’t be able to stay that reserved against some of the better team the Bucs are about to face and he’ll have to take more chances, but if that’s his baseline moving forward, he’ll always give his team a chance to win, especially at home.