Jameis Winston’s Great Weight Adventures continue with season three

Before getting drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2015, there was some controversy over Jameis Winston’s weight. Which then led to his losing weight last year, and then eh...not really looking any faster on the field.

So I guess it’s time for part three of Jameis Winston’s Great Weight Adventure, as Jonathan Jones of Sports Illustrated got Winston to say a thing about losing weight and gaining abs.

It’s an off-season cliché that each player is in the best shape of his life, but that definitely seems to be the case for Jameis Winston. He was pudgy in pre-draft workouts and slimmed down last off-season, and this spring he looks trimmer. He joked that he’s up to four abs now and is weighing in at 235 pounds, which is where he wants to be at the end of July. “I want to be heavy going into training camp because I’m going to lose that [by sweating],” Winston said.

Well, that’s good to hear, I guess.

I’m kind of fascinated by the eternal fascination with the kind of shape and weight players are in. It....doesn’t really mean much to third-party observers even when we’re talking about positions that are not quarterback.

The general thing to do is gain weight for power, lose weight for speed and find some balance somewhere, but all of that depends a lot on what coaches ask, what coaches think is the right way to play, and also temporarily weight fluctuations—it’s not uncommon for players to gain or lose a bunch of weight during the season—which somehow always goes unnoticed.

But when it comes to quarterbacks all of this becomes genuinely baffling. I’m sure that getting to the right weight is important for the athletic performance of any player, but I’m somehow a lot more interested in Winston’s improvement in accuracy, his reaction pressure, his ability to improvise, and his ability to read defenses than whether he’s losed or gained a handful of pounds.

Ah well. Guess we’ll have to wait until preseason for real hints of that improvement.