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Ivan Maisel, ESPN Senior Writer 10y

Winston's timing, message all wrong

Jameis Winston picked the wrong week to shout something demeaning to women.

The NFL is in freefall, with limbs reaching for a toehold like Wile E. Coyote after he begins to plummet. The commissioner is explaining why he shouldn’t be fired. Two players charged with attacking women have been shifted onto the exempt list, only because the drawn-and-quartered list doesn’t yet exist.

A federal judge in Alabama, a conservative jurist appointed by President George W. Bush, has been charged with hitting his wife in a luxury hotel in Atlanta, and the state’s two Republican senators have both called for him to resign.

If this is the nation’s Rosa Parks moment regarding violence toward women, Winston picked the wrong week to mimic the worst form of frat-boy behavior at the top of his lungs while atop a table at the student union.

Florida State deserves credit for suspending Winston one day after the incident. The university deserves credit for re-opening the suspension Friday night and lengthening it from the first half to the entire game against ACC Atlantic rival Clemson.

Florida State issued a statement late Friday and said the doubling of the suspension came about because of additional information uncovered in the university’s ongoing investigation. It’s hard to imagine what could be more offensive than Winston’s original behavior.

It must have taken the university this long to develop the information because releasing it at 11 p.m. ET on a Friday is a public relations nightmare. The decision to suspend Winston for the entire game will dominate the news until kickoffs begin at noon.

Throughout his college life, Winston has been unable to grasp the maturity that it takes to be an American public figure. He said what he said in innocence, on the spur of the moment, without understanding that nothing he shouts from a tabletop is just among friends. Winston is lucky neither Florida State nor the American public has a three-strikes policy for stupidity, or he would be out on the street.

Winston picked the wrong moment to do what he did. America speaks quickly these days, and conventional wisdom goes viral with such force that no quarantine can contain it. Wife-beating hasn’t begat an ice bucket challenge, but the nation has decided spousal abuse is this week’s ALS -- another disease that has resisted all efforts to cure.

It’s about time, and if Winston got caught in the undertow, tough break. In the end, he brought it upon himself.

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