I don’t know if you can “break Instagram” like you can “break Twitter” but Jameis Winston did his best last night after being selected #1 overall by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Winston put a photo on Instagram of himself in his Bucs gear celebrating the draft by sitting down to eat crab legs. Yes, crab legs.
We can only assume that they were properly bought and paid for at a local establishment or that they were a gift of some kind that thankfully no longer violated NCAA rules. Winston’s caption said “Thanks Capt for the crab legs.”
But then in a curious development, the Instagram post was taken down the morning after after being shared all over social media and even reaching ESPN.
Why would Winston take the photo down, especially after pretty much the entire sports world had seen it? Was the picture really that inflammatory? Is he not allowed to poke fun at himself?
It’s not so hard to imagine someone in the Bucs organization having a polite word with him that making light of the shoplifting incident wasn’t in his best interests. Perhaps “Instagram posting habits” slipped under the radar of Tampa Bay’s CIA-level investigation into Winston.
But there might be something larger at play here. The crab legs are just a footnote to the very real and very serious dilemmas involving Jameis Winston that are still ongoing. He can poke fun at crab legs in an Instagram post, but he can’t poke fun at a civil lawsuit over sexual assault allegations. By bringing one of those incidents to light, he also brings back all the controversy that made him such a lightning rod in his time at Florida State. The bottom line is if it was any other player having a laugh at his own expense, without the much more serious issues that have plagued Jameis Winston, then that post would still probably be online as we speak.
