Buccaneers coach Greg Schiano met with the media on Tuesday for the first time since the trade of tight end Kellen Winslow to the Seahawks.
As you might expect, there were quite a few questions about Winslow and why the team decided to send him to Seattle in exchange for a seventh-round pick that can become a sixth rounder if certain conditions are met. Schiano wasn’t willing to meet any of the interest with explanations for why the deal was made, however.
Rick Stroud and Stephen Holder of the Tampa Bay Times each tweeted that Schiano passed on the opportunity to talk about Winslow. He said that he wanted to think about the future instead of the past, a path that Stroud related to baseball player Mark McGwire’s appearance before Congress when he refused to answer questions about his steroid use.
It doesn’t take much to understand why the Bucs were willing to part ways with Winslow. His knee problems aren’t going to start getting better at this point in his career, he’s got a lot of time left on his contract and he doesn’t flash much of the playmaking ability he had earlier in his career. For a coach taking over a team that went 4-12 last season, those are hardly appealing traits.
That said, Winslow still caught 75 passes to lead the Bucs last year and it wasn’t like he was part of a high-flying offense that inflated everyone’s numbers. Surely Schiano could have come up with 30 seconds about the trade of such a player, even if it was filled with generalities that avoided any discussion of specific problems between Winslow and the team.