Time for the Bucs and Winston to part ways

Might as well start off 2018 with a very large bang - it’s time for the Tampa Bay Bucs to trade Jameis Winston and start fresh with a quarterback with equal skills and much less baggage. Winston’s value is going to continue to spiral downward, not that he ever was that much with his alarming tendency to give the opposing team the ball about three times a game. Tellingly, Kevin Clark of The Ringer lists the star QBs of tomorrow as Garoppolo, Goff, Prescott, Watson and Wentz – no mention of #3. The Buc’s record during the Winston era is 19-29 – a couple of those wins with Ryan Fitzpatrick at the helm - not exactly Tom Brady-like. And with the Buc’s draft position this season there are two excellent quarterbacks who could fall in their laps – Louisville’s Lamar Jackson and USC’s Sam Darnold Both are excellent college quarterbacks (we particularly like Jackson), again, without the rape, groping and shoplifting baggage – not to mention how often he loses his composure on the field. It’s a daring move, but has a lot more upside than down. The question is - are the Bucs willing to admit they made a large mistake with Winston?

Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

1. Recent developments give hope that Florida will not become California or Colorado East. The city of Dunedin votes to extend the moratorium on medical pot dispensaries. Meanwhile, First Green Bank, the first Florida bank to handle pot producing clients, has dropped them effective a week ago. Rock on.

2. We have now completed another round of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza and New Years – or as we like to refer to it, The Festival of Carbs.

3. In that same vein, the stars aligned during the holidays with Florida-perfect weather, thousands of happy visitors and happy merchants and attraction operators.

4. It looks unlikely that Governor Scott will call a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jack Latvala. If he does, the overwhelming favorite would be former State Rep. Ed Hooper, who plans to run for the seat in the regular election. Latvala would have been termed out.

5. You’ve lived in the bay area a long time if you enjoyed a slice or two of pizza served up by Shakey’s Pizza Parlors – good pizza complete with a ragtime piano. There are now only about 50 Shakey’s left – virtually all in California.

The diamond, the media and other stuff:

6. “The alphabet now ends at Y." The words of Sue Grafton’s daughter in announcing her famed mother’s passing last week. The mystery writer’s signature was alphabetical titles – the last being Y Is For Yesterday.

7. The I-4 teams (USF and UCF) acquitted themselves nicely against SEC and SWC teams in last week’s bowls.

8. Regardless of Monday’s college championship game outcome, the winner is the SEC. With revenue sharing, all SEC teams get a piece of the total revenues from the game rather splitting the take with another conference – a rather significant pay day for Alabama, Georgia and their playmates.

9. Related to our lead piece: Memo to Bucs’ front office – did you happen to catch the Tennessee-Kansas City game?

10. From the 5:05 Newsletter, never afraid to reach beyond our borders for its version of the news: President Vladimir Putin announced that he will run for a sixth term as president in 2018. An hour later, he announced that he had won.

Our Hall of Fame ballot:

The Hall of Fame announces their 2018 Class in a couple weeks. We emphasize that we do not have a ballot BUT if we had one, six names would be checked off starting with this year’s only certainty – Chipper Jones. Joining him on our ballot are hitting machine Vlad Guerrero, consistently excellent right hander Mike Mussina, Cleveland slugger Jim Thome, fielding magician Omar Vizquel and the game’s greatest left handed reliever Billy Wagner. We continue to be baffled why this critical major league position gets short shrift (see Hoffman, Trevor and Smith, Lee).

SNEAK PEEK AT NEXT WEEK: Next governor, taking a knee in China, tax plan