It took until well into football season to find the worst play of the year for 2014, and all it took was about 16 hours to find a worthy candidate for 2015. Behold the exploits of Florida State QB Jameis Winston in the Rose Bowl against the Oregon, a comical 8 seconds of folly resulting in a gift-wrapped TD for the Ducks:
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| Psst ... yer doin' it wrong ... |
“If everybody in this room just want to be real with themselves, this game could have went either way. We turned the ball over a lot. We beat ourself. Just be real with yourself right now. We beat ourself.”
– Jameis Winston
I’m not exactly sure in what sport a 39-pt. defeat could be considered to have been close – 5-day Test cricket, perhaps – but football sure ain’t it. And I cannot recall an athlete – and, by proxy, a team – more worthy of being rooted against than Winston and the Seminoles in recent memory.
Winston, of course, has had a seemingly endless series of legal and off-field troubles, the majority of them stemming from an alleged sexual assault. Now, it’s not The Lose’s place to cast judgment in such a case, but the broader narrative which has come to pass through all of that is of an athlete feeling a sense of entitlement and that they can get away with anything – a notion fortified by the behaviours of those involved in the program, the university, and the town where the university is located. All of the flawed processes involved in that particular case – from the investigation by the Tallahassee P.D. to the FSU disciplinary hearings – gave off the impression that it was far more important to make sure the Heisman Trophy-winning QB would be out on the field the following Saturday than it was to make sure actual justice and due process were followed.
I have no doubt that Florida State is a serviceable university where you can get a decent education, but the fact of the matter is that success on the football field has given the school a stature and national profile it could never otherwise hope to attain. In attempting to explain the bizarro culture of college athletics to The Official Wife of In Play Lose, I’ve found the best way to do so is liken the athletic department to an arm of the marketing wing. When the football team wins, the alumni are happy and the donations go up. As such, no one should ever be surprised if/when athletes and, more notably, coaches wind up being treated like BMOCs who feel free to run about the place and do whatever they like with little or no consequences attached.
And Florida State is such a place, to be sure. It’s instances like the Winston caper which leads to the term “football school” being thrown about with particular disdain. The Seminoles have been named national champions three times, and everyone even peripherally involved in the program has obviously gotten too big for their britches. F.S.U. football has a largesse to it that makes Tallahassee’s other notable residents – the politicos who govern the weirdest state in America – pale in comparison. By giving off the impression through all of this that criminal behaviour is somehow condoned, it makes it pretty clear that the university has lost its way. No place was this more evident in recent years than at Penn State, where a series of unspeakable crimes occurred on the watch of iconic football coach Joe Paterno. It was a common refrain that JoPa had ‘built Penn State,’ and it wasn’t necessarily hyperbole, as the Nittany Lions’ success on the gridiron over JoPa’s 50 years gave the university a profile and a stamp of legitimacy from which it grew to be a major research institution. But at what cost? No one should ever be above the law, and no one whomever enabled such disgusting acts should ever be above reproach – not even an icon. Especially not an icon, in fact. I have always found the virulent support for Paterno in the aftermath of that scandal, which took him and much of his legacy down with it, to be completely misguided and somewhat disturbing. Because for all the good that may have come to the university over the years, if a school reaches a point where it cannot even guarantee the safety of young people, it has fundamentally failed as an institution.
And in the case of the Rose Bowl, most everyone wanted to see Florida State fail. Now, to be fair, Oregon has ‘employed’ its share of knuckleheads at times as well during its 20-year ascent to the peak of college athletics. No school has a greater sense of entitlement attached to it these days than one whose growth has been almost entirely funded by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike and college athletics’ single greatest sugar daddy. And anyone well versed in Pac-12 history, and the ways fans would get on players at the dubious Mac Court, knows that the Oregons are not always well-versed in the ways of good taste. But the Ducks definitely took on the role of the guys in the white hats in Pasadena. Florida State won a national championship and 27 games in a row with Jameis Winston as a starting QB, many of them were games where the Seminoles had to rally late to pull off improbable wins. Both on the field and off, he’s always found a way to wriggle off the hook. (Or, occasionally, had one found for him.) With a teflon-coated leader and a propensity for pulling the great escape, Florida State’s aura and mystique (along with its opinion of itself) got bigger and bigger. The impression their play gave off was that they weren’t that good, but no one could seem to prove otherwise on the field.
Until the Rose Bowl, that is, when the bubble finally burst and did so in the most comical, most embarrassing, and most emphatic of ways.
“No one likes to lose, man. I mean, losing is really not in my vocabulary, to be honest with you.”
– Jameis Winston
Given where he’s going to wind up next season, it probably should be. Winston will now duck out of town (pun intended) and likely find himself a top draft pick come April, placed upon a terrible team with terrible talent that is desperate for any sort of good news. He certainly has the talent to play at that level, but if you’re the Bucs or the Titans or some other downtrodden franchise, do you really want to give the keys to a guy who’s shown so little maturity? And I’m not just talking about kids-doing-stupid-things-that-kids-do kind of stuff here when I talk about immaturity. I’m talking about deviant behaviour verging on criminality. Being an NFL QB is the single toughest job in all of sports, and along with it comes an inevitable leadership role both on the field and off of it as well. You are, in fact, a role model and you are, in fact, something of a civic leader when you go under center on Sundays for a living, whether you like it or not. You have to grow up in a hurry, because no one is going to hold your hand anymore. If you can’t hack it, they get rid of you and find someone who can. Such is the nature of such a competitive business.
As for Florida State, well, universities are inherently transitory. The student body turns over completely on a regular basis, it shifts and moves on. Given how much sweeping under the rug went on the past couple of years in Tallahassee, there will probably be a palpable sense of relief if and when it all just goes away.
And somehow, I just managed to get through an entire article about Florida State without mentioning that stupid tomahawk chop … d’oh! …
