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There are some dumb takes. And there are some REALLY dumb takes.
This case is certainly the latter.
Buccaneers quarterback Jameis Winston has placed himself in some bad positions since his college days at Florida State. Most recent incident was over two years ago where he was accused of groping a female Uber driver.
Some have compared Winston to other athletes and NFL names with transgressions of past and present. While some are try to make a case for it, none have been more ridiculous than what came out of the mouth of an ESPN vice president when asked by The Athletic if college football has been damaged for viewers.
“I don’t think so,” said Lee Fitting, the vice president of college sports at ESPN and the point person for the company’s coverage of college football. “It has been brutal to watch, brutal to read about. It’s disgusting. It’s depressing. I just think at the end of the day people are still going to watch these games. I don’t want to say it is right or wrong. But — and I hate saying this and it is sad to say this — the sport has been through these rough patches whether it was Joe Paterno and Penn State, Baylor and Art Briles, the Jameis Winston stuff. It’s sad but the sport has been through this. For whatever reason, the sport continues to be very popular.”
Fitting decided to just randomly name major scandals in college football and so happened to mention Winston’s. How fitting.
There are major differences between the cases he mentioned that doesn’t necessarily pair Winston in the same league on many levels. From the initial claim to the final outcome and everything else in between, there are other scandals Fitting could have mentioned. And that horse has already been beaten beyond death so no, we aren’t going to re-visit the details of that case.
This just validates why the four letter network always had it out for Winston.