It’s almost as if he said, I know what you think of me, and I’m going to prove you right.
It’s almost like, when faced with the notion that he was coddled and protected by sheer force of his athletic abilities (he’s also a gifted baseball pitcher), Winston decided to put this notion to the test.
At the very least, you would have thought this might have prodded him to accrue a certain amount of self-awareness, but it’s almost like Winston chose, instead, to embrace the stereotype that others had put upon him. In that moment, the questions about Jameis Winston transformed into something far more fraught than issues with his arm angle or his pocket presence in that moment, whether guilty or innocent, Jameis Winston became a metaphorical totem for every college athlete who had ever considered themselves above the law. Soon after I talked to his coaches, we all learned that Jameis Winston had been accused of sexual assault in December 2012, though he was never charged soon after that, The New York Times reported that the investigation into the case had been severely botched by local police. In a vacuum, this seems like the sort of idiotic act that college students pull in order to call attention to themselves, except that Jameis Winston no longer resides in the prodigal vacuum he did when he was younger. This week, Winston was suspended for the first half of Saturday’s Clemson game, ostensibly as punishment for standing up on a table and reciting a crude Internet meme about fornicating with a woman in front of hundreds of witnesses.