Jameis Winston Contract with Tampa Bay Says He Can't Play Baseball

As Russell Wilson continues to attend Rangers Spring Training and make (probable) idle threats about wanting to play professional baseball, there was some question about whether Jameis Winston might also leave the door open to being a two-sport athlete. However, that will not be the case, at least not in the near-term. Peter King reports in today’s MMQB:

You may recall when I wrote about Winston—the Florida State baseball team’s closer last season—at the combine in my Feb. 23 column that I asked him whether he would ever want to play both sports as a professional. “I can’t speak on that,” he said. “It has always been my dream, but I’m just playing football right now.”

That section of the column alarmed Licht, and that Monday he texted Winston and then spoke with him about it. He told Winston that wasn’t something the Bucs would be likely to accept if he was their pick. Winston said he understood, but loved baseball so much that he was being honest about it with me. Fast forward to last week. Licht and agents Greg Genske and Kenny Felder negotiated the Winston contract so he’d have the business of football out of the way and he could focus solely on football, starting with the Bucs’ minicamp that gets underway Thursday in Tampa. In the contract, a Bucs’ source said, is a clause prohibiting Winston from playing professional baseball during the life of his Tampa Bay deal.

This was undoubtedly a smart move by the Bucs, who would not want their first overall pick exposed to the injury risk of baseball, nor of the schedule creeping past at least 25% of the NFL regular season, but it’s kind of a bummer that it continues to seem less and less likely that we’ll ever see someone follow in the footsteps of Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders again.