FAB 2. WINSTON NEEDS TO BECOME A STONE COLD KILLER LIKE BRADY
While watching New England’s historic come-from-behind overtime victory over Atlanta in Super Bowl LI on Sunday, I couldn’t help but thinking about how Tampa Bay quarterback Jameis Winston would fare in leading the Buccaneers to an NFL championship. I’d be lying to you if I thought I knew for sure that Winston would fare well, and play as good as Matt Ryan – let alone Tom Brady – did in the greatest Super Bowl of all time.

I don’t doubt Winston’s ability to win a Super Bowl for Tampa Bay. I actually believe it’s going to happen. But I don’t think it’s going to happen this coming year unless Winston makes some real changes to his game.

Patriots QB Tom Brady – Photo by: Getty Images

Ryan was 7-of-8 for 115 yards and a touchdown at halftime as the Falcons built a 21-3 lead. By the time Atlanta increased its lead to 28-3 early in the third quarter behind Ryan’s second touchdown pass he had completed 11-of-14 passes for 193 yards and two scores. Ryan, the league’s MVP, looked like he was on his way to becoming the Super Bowl MVP with his hot start.

Instead, that distinction went to Brady, the greatest quarterback in NFL history and five-time Super Bowl champion. Brady went from being cold in the first half where he completed 16-of-26 passes (61.5 percent) for 184 yards and a pick-six, to red hot in the second half and overtime.

Brady completed 27-of-36 of his passes (75 percent) for 282 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions after halftime as New England outscored Atlanta 31-7 in the second half and overtime to overcome a 25-point deficit to win its fifth Super Bowl championship in franchise history.

Could Winston start off as hot as Ryan in such a big game? Could Winston finish as strong as Brady with a Super Bowl championship in on the line?

Winston has accomplished a great deal since being the No. 1 overall pick in the 2015 NFL Draft. He’s had back-to-back 4,000-yard seasons. Winston became a Pro Bowler during his rookie year. He led the Bucs to their first winning season in six years in just his second season.

Winston became a more accurate passer in 2016, raising his completion percentage from 58.3 percent in 2015 to 60.8 percent. He also increased his passing touchdowns from 22 as a rookie to 28 last year. Winston is on the right track, but he has a ways to go before being a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback.

Bucs QB Jameis Winston – Photo by: Getty Images

Winston is a streaky passer who sometimes starts cold and then heats up late, as he did in Tampa Bay’s Week 17 win against Carolina and a Week 7 win at San Francisco, or starts hot and then cools off, as he did in a Week 12 win over Seattle and a Week 8 loss to Oakland.

Then there are some games where Winston is cold, then hot, then cold again, such as a Week 5 win at Carolina and losses against Los Angeles in Week 3, at Dallas in Week 15 and at New Orleans in Week 16.

“We saw the streaky side a little bit of Jameis,” Bucs head coach Dirk Koetter said following the team’s 26-20 loss at Dallas. “He got off to a slow start. Even though we got a good drive and got that early lead, against a team like this, you can’t kick field goals and expect to win. You look at the stats at the end and we’re 1-for-3 in the red zone. Those other eight points would have helped us. The second one was that penalty that you mentioned earlier. That’s been hurting us the last few weeks and it caught up to us tonight. The flip side is what Jameis was able to do when we got some rhythm going there in the third quarter. That’s a plus. That shows you what we’re capable of doing when we’re firing. We got a little hot there in that third quarter and we came right back.”

But then Winston went cold with the Bucs just needing one touchdown drive to beat the Cowboys in the fourth quarter and couldn’t do it despite having five possessions at the end of the game – two of which ended with interceptions. It was a similar story in Tampa Bay’s overtime loss to Oakland. After the Raiders tied the game at 24-24 in the fourth quarter, Winston and the Bucs couldn’t muster a field goal drive and had three consecutive three-and-outs.

To truly be great and win Super Bowls, Winston needs to be more consistent and less streaky, but that may be problematic for such an emotionally charged player. Those emotions can serve Winston and the team well at times, but can also work against him, as was the case in Dallas when Winston was flagged for a head butt on a Dallas defender who was roughing up running back Doug Martin inside the Cowboys’ red zone. That Tampa Bay scoring drive ended in a field goal rather than a touchdown.

“I was protecting my teammate,” Winston said after the game. “Doug runs hard for us all the time, and got thrown on the ground late. It was passion versus emotion and I can’t do it.”

Koetter loves Winston’s passion for the game, but noted that the young quarterback’s emotion hurt the team on that play.

“Jameis let his emotions get the best of him on that,” Koetter said. “That can’t happen.”

Bucs QB Jameis Winston, head coach Dirk Koetter and OC Todd Monken – Photo by: Mark Lomoglio/PR

Winston was too amped up to start the Cowboys game, which was a nationally televised contest with a playoff berth on the line, and that may have affected his accuracy in that game. Winston completed 48.6 percent of his passes against Dallas, which tied his season-low set against Denver, and many of his passes sailed high as a result.

“I know early in the game everybody was excited – who wasn’t excited to play on Sunday Night against one of the so-called best teams in the league?” said Bucs offensive coordinator Todd Monken. “So, everybody’s eager to prove themselves as a player, but I can’t say exactly. All the above, I’m sure there was some mechanical things, some of it was pressure, some of it was depth of route, some of it was when you’re under duress, the margin for error of a throw here or there. So again, just continuing to not only protect better, rep it in practice and for us to get our right depth so we can be consistent.
 
“He was locked in, I don’t think it [was] that he wasn’t locked in mentally. We didn’t have anything where there were calls that were something that we hadn’t worked on. Again, he gets excited. He’s a competitive player, so sometimes it’s hard to say with emotional players. That is what makes him who he is.”

Fearing Winston might get too hyped for his pro debut on Monday Night Football earlier this year in a 17-14 win at Carolina, the Bucs opened up the game with six straight runs by Jacquizz Rodgers just to help calm him down. In fact, Koetter ran Rodgers 10 times out of the first 12 plays on the Bucs’ opening drive against the Panthers, which ended in a field goal.

As a result of being too amped up for some big games, Winston started cold too often in his redshirt sophomore season at Florida State, throwing interceptions in the first half before rallying the Seminoles to some amazing wins in the second half against North Carolina State, Notre Dame, Louisville and Miami. Bucs general manager Jason Licht was at the Louisville game in 2014 and saw Winston shake off three first-half interceptions to help dig Florida State out of a 21-0 hole to win 42-31.

Bucs WR Mike Evans – Photo by: Mark Lomoglio/PR

Winston does have the ability to rally a team, evidenced by three fourth quarterback comebacks (versus Dallas and at Atlanta in 2015, and at San Diego in 2016) and three more game-winning drives (versus Atlanta in 2015, and home and away against Carolina in 2016), but fell short this year in the fourth quarter against Los Angeles and Oakland, and at Dallas and at New Orleans.

Licht has likened Winston to Brady, who he was around in 2002 and again from 2009-11, due to the passionate, competitive nature of both quarterbacks. Winston needs to be emulating Brady as much as he can in terms of calming down and channeling his passion into that of a calm, stone cold killer when the game is on the line rather than letting emotion and excitement rob him of accuracy.

That will come in time due to his age, as Koetter notes, marveling at Winston’s ability to lead at the age of 23.

“I think there’s definitely something to that and there’s different styles – I’m sure Tom Brady and [Green Bay quarterback] Aaron Rodgers and [Pittsburgh quarterback] Ben Roethlisberger and we’re seeing one of the best in [New Orleans quarterback] Drew Brees this week, they all have their own style,” Koetter said prior to Tampa Bay’s Week 16 contest at New Orleans. “Leadership can take on many forms, but you also have to be able to back it up with your play and Jameis has done that. He’s got a unique style I would say, to pro football. That’s part of his youth.

Patriots QB Tom Brady – Photo by: Getty Images

“We’ve got to keep reminding ourselves he should be a senior in college right now. But it’s refreshing – I’ve said it many times, if you didn’t know better, it could come across almost as corny sometimes, but when Jameis does it, it’s not. I’m saying, it doesn’t come across as corny at all when he does it. If I said some of the stuff he did, or some other quarterbacks I’ve been around – because it wouldn’t be them. But that’s Jameis and that’s really who he is, it’s who he is every day. And after the players are around it, they’re attracted to that because sometimes Jameis says things that they wish they could say, or they wish they had it in them to say. And then he backs it up.”
 
Winston has the leadership part down pat. And he’s proven that he can win in big games before, such as the National Championship game against Auburn, leading a game-winning drive in the final minute as a Heisman Trophy-winning redshirt freshman, and in the NFL with impressive victories against playoff teams like Atlanta, Seattle and Kansas City this year. Not to mention sweeping Carolina, which represented the NFC last year, in 2016.

Quarterbacks coach Mike Bajakian will continue to work on Winston’s mechanics so that he can become a more accurate passer from a physical standpoint. Now it’s up to Winston to work on the mental and emotional part of his game.

“Just like every player, they all have things they need to work on to get better at,” Licht told me at the Senior Bowl. “What people forget is that he should be out here [at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala.] right now, I mean he’s younger than Dak Prescott. He’s a young guy, who’s very mature and very smart, but he just turned 23 years old and he’s not a finished product. He’ll be the first one to tell you that and we’re all extremely excited about him. We think that he’s already a good quarterback and we think he’s going to be a great quarterback. I have no doubt that he will become that because he already is a very good quarterback.

“Those are just parts of the maturation process of a quarterback. People don’t realize how big that is and those moments, playing Sunday Night Football. He’s a very excitable guy and he wears his emotions on his sleeves. I’m sure these are things that are going through his head, too. I’m positive that he’s going to improve on all the things he needs to improve on.”

When I asked Koetter about Winston sometimes getting too amped at the start of games and needing to rein in his emotions better, he defended his young quarterback and said learning how to handle his emotions better will come in time.

“You know, Jameis played in big games in college, I mean as big of games as you can play in and he won a lot of games,” Koetter said. “That word ‘sometimes’ is misused. He’s only played in 32 games. So how many is sometimes?

Patriots QB Tom Brady – Photo by: Getty Images

“Jameis is among the most passionate players I’ve ever been around – if not the most passionate. There’s a difference between passion and emotion, and sometimes he can get too emotional in a game. Again, I think he prides himself on passion and I think there are times when he’s too emotional. That’s usually set off by something in the game, and I think experience will prove to be the best teacher for him in that respect.”

I have always likened Winston’s style of quarterback play to that of Brady, who travels to Tampa Bay to play the Bucs in 2017, due to their passionate leadership style, ability to sling the ball and their ultra-competitive nature. That’s why I had Winston in all of PewterReport.com’s mock drafts to the Bucs in 2015.

Brady has the pin-point accuracy that Winston does not yet possess, but Winston’s ability to improvise behind the line of scrimmage, scramble and make plays is better than Brady due to his superior athleticism.

Licht sees the similarities, too, and that’s why he pulled the trigger and brought Winston to Tampa Bay. If I’m Winston, I’m studying Brady this offseason and even flying up to Boston to meet him.

Winston’s exposure to Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson at the Pro Bowl last year helped inspire Winston trim down, be in peak physical condition and become more mobile. Now it’s time for Winston to work on the mental and emotional aspect of his game and the legendary Brady is the place to start.