In all seriousness what the hell do you guys expect? I mean I get it, Winston is a bad person, that's probably pretty certain now, but you can't dismiss a Heisman trophy winner for almost being caught doing something bad.
He was accused of rape. The police did a shitty job investigating it. Ok. That really sucks for the girl and for justice and its totally unacceptable. (I'll also add that it really sucks for Winston if he was innocent, because now it will be forever impossible to cleanly state that you were found innocent of the charges.) But are you going to kick the kid off your team for that? Nope. No way. In fact, there is pretty substantial evidence that ND would've done a hell of a lot more to protect Winston in such a situation.
Ok so next he stole some soda from a BK after he ordered water.... I'm pretty sure I did that last Tuesday. Next.
Next he played with BB guns and caused property damage. He was required to pay for the damage. This is the point where Winston starts to officially look like a dumbass. But he's still just a dumbass. There are a lot of dumbasses on teams across the country.
Next are stealing crab legs. Ok, now we have a crime. But the issue is that this is a misdemeanor. He was caught, he was punished, and he got a ton of national shit for it. He probably would've missed a game but it luckily happened in the offseason. This is one way that ND might have handled things differently, but maybe not. Plenty of ND players have been charged with more serious stuff and not missed any significant playing time.
Next he stood on campus and screamed a sexual sentence. FSU then suspended him for a game. Not because what he did was illegal, not because he broke any rules, but because FSU wanted to send him a message that they were tired of him being a dumbass. I thought the fact that they did this for Clemson weekend took a lot of nuts and I was very surprised at how proactive they were about it.
Now there are autographs out there. But none of them at this point can be traced back to him. And trust me, I get it. There are a LOT of autographs, and there is virtually 0 doubt in my mind that he wasn't paid handsomely for each one. But here's the issue. You can't prove it. And something tells me that if something similar happened with Everett next year, this board would be singing a very different tune. From the "he didn't, he's clean" crowd to the "I'm suddenly concerned with player's rights!" crowd.
So we have a total: 1 petty theft, 0 "real" crimes charged, 1 potential NCAA violation (lol), 3 counts of doing stupid college shit, 1 Heisman, 1 National Championship, and 19-0. And you guys are saying that the fact that he hasn't been kicked out of FSU is shameful? Guys, lets be honest, he wouldn't be kicked out of any major college football program in the country. The only thing shameful about FSU's actions is how bad their PR department is that they couldn't head any of this stuff off.
