Why No. 1 pick Jameis Winston is monumental risk for Buccaneers

— -- Talent can make you believe things you otherwise would never believe, and nobody knows that like Bobby Beathard, a great executive who once allowed a quarterback's physical skill to sucker him into making a staggering mistake at the NFL draft.

Beathard was general manager of the San Diego Chargers in 1998 when, after failing to persuade Indianapolis Colts GM Bill Polian to deal him the first overall pick and the right to land Peyton Manning, he gave Arizona a truckload of assets to trade up to take Ryan Leaf with the second pick. Plenty of football men thought Leaf would be a better pro than Manning. All these years later, you could define the then 21-year-old Leaf as a taller, more athletic prospect than the 21-year-old quarterback the Tampa Bay Buccaneers selected No. 1 Thursday night, Jameis Winston.

Despite assurances from Leaf's coach at Washington State, Mike Price, that his guy's personal character was the equal of Manning's, Beathard had intel from a staff member at the school suggesting that Leaf was arrogant and too fond of having a good time.

"We had concerns about Ryan and we thought we could work through it, and it backfired," the retired 78-year-old executive said from his Tennessee home. "We just made a big mistake. ... Sometimes you see a guy with so much ability that you think, 'We can't pass this guy up. We can change his character.' But boy, changing someone's character is a really hard thing to do."

That's why Winston represents the biggest gamble in modern draft history. If Leaf stands among the draft's most conspicuous busts (he threw 14 touchdown passes and 36 interceptions in a 25-game career and later did prison time on burglary and drug charges), the pre-draft character concerns about him wouldn't fill up a page in a Winston personnel file as thick as the Tampa phone book.

The Buccaneers took their Bob Beamon leap of faith, anyway, after conducting what they described as a thorough vetting of Winston the human being. You know the list of transgressions by now, best separated into two categories: (1) the immature and mindless acts involving BB and pellet guns, stolen crab legs and Burger King sodas, and the shouting of a profane, sexually explicit Internet meme from the top of a campus table; and (2) the ultra-serious allegation that he raped a fellow Florida State student. Winston wasn't criminally charged in the case and wasn't found to have violated the school's honor code in a hearing; he now faces a civil lawsuit filed by his accuser.

What does it all mean when evaluating the future face of your franchise? As much as NFL teams have talked up the need to draft and develop good citizens in the wake of the Aaron Hernandez, Ray Rice, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson cases, the Bucs clearly made a choice based on talent when they picked Winston over another Heisman Trophy winner, Marcus Mariota, a more dynamic athlete who owns better passing stats and a blowout victory over Winston's team in the national semis.