There is one simple, positively regarded character trait that an athlete can possess that will overwhelm his detractors and shield him from any critique of his personal moral compass, regardless of the truth that critique may contain.

There is one superlative that serves as an asterisk to any mention of an athlete’s desolated virtue, that will grant professional immunity from a record of abject crime, that will ensure job security from the bleakest of holding cells and streamline his path to redemption upon release.

It’s the ultimate provider of free-passes. It’s the blindfold happily pulled on by adorers. It’s the reflex that shakes the hand of a man unseemly and unremorseful before passing a check across the table.

It’s simple, and the recognition of it as savior has a jarring, cynical lack of profundity.

It’s Talent.

An athlete with it can bruise and bloody the body, head to foot, of a woman in an apartment full of witnesses, throw her on a bed covered in heavy artillery, threaten her life, and not only beat the charge, but earn a new professional football contract and be called the leader of his team.

An athlete without it is cut from that same team for failure to wear a tie.

And an athlete with talent can win the most prestigious award in college athletics, an award whose voters are asked to take ‘character’ and ‘moral fiber’ into consideration when selecting its victor, while the subject of a sexual assault investigation.

And that same athlete with talent can be selected as the first overall pick in the NFL Draft, as clamor and outrage over his alleged crime proves superficial as it wanes in typical fashion to reverence, the speed of this transformation of public opinion in direct correspondence to his growing ability to play football.

The sexual assault case against Jameis Winston has been expanded upon elsewhere, most notably by the New York Times, and the details of the abhorrent mismanagement of the investigation by the Tallahassee Police Department are now public record. Separate even from the facts of the alleged assault and the failure of its investigation, however, there is another, seemingly less important yet still critical to understand dimension to the case against Winston. The element of the case that relates directly to the culture of sports fandom is obviously inferior to the devastating realities that the case itself reinforces about sexual assault on college campuses, but to a degree, because this case involves a popular athlete, it presents questions related to sports culture whose answers may help gauge how our society reacts to violent crimes, their victims, and the people alleged to have committed them.

The simple truth is that the more we, as fans, continue to idolize and worship and revere players whose off-field behavior crosses beyond immoral and becomes criminal, the stronger the message to the athlete – particularly the young athlete on a college campus — becomes: ‘If I’m good, I can do anything.’ The stronger the message to general managers becomes ‘If he’s good, I can enable his corruption and publicize institutional support of it. I can give him a contract.’

So:

How much are we, as sports fans, willing to tolerate from an athlete before we begin to feel uncomfortable making an emotional investment in the hope of their professional, public glory? When do we decide to stop cheering for an athlete? What determines our tolerance threshold for victimization? To what degree are front office executives responsible, by either cutting deeply flawed athletes from or signing them to large-money contracts, for serving as the group who determines for us the level of criminality that is acceptable in professional sports?

Put simply, when a fan puts on a Jameis Winston jersey, what exactly is the personal message he’s conveying to the world around him?

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The common assessment when a player with a criminal history is signed or cut by a professional sports team is one of Skill vs. Severity. In 2013, Ray Rice had career lows as a starter in rushing attempts, rushing yards, yards per carry, and touchdowns. When video footage surfaced in August 2014 of Rice launching a haymaker to the face of his then-fiance in a casino elevator in Atlantic City, he was immediately cut by the Ravens. As the dust settled, media analyses agreed that given the steady decline in Rice’s production, the crime Rice had committed – or the footage of it – was gruesome enough to render his level of Skill, his value as a player, irrelevant. The reaction by the Ravens front office to this atrocity was essentially a tactical one – Rice simply didn’t play well enough for the Ravens to invest resources to deal with the fallout of his actions. The balance tipped toward Severity, so Rice was cut.

In 2013 – the last full season that Greg Hardy has managed to stay on the field – he sacked his opposing quarterback 15 times. In March 2015, just a few weeks after his court case concluded, he was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to a one year contract worth over $11 million. Not only was Hardy deemed talented enough to merit employment at the seventh-highest per-year salary among players at his position (with incentives that could push that salary into the top-five), but he was signed while the NFL was still conducting a personal conduct investigation against him, which investigation was widely expected to punish Hardy with a significant game suspension. Greg Hardy is great at playing football, and the Cowboys signed him despite both the recent violent criminal case against him and despite the certain likelihood that he’d miss a significant portion of this season due to suspension. The balance of Skill vs. Severity somehow tipped toward ‘Skill.’

The unresolved issue behind these assessments is our willingness, as fans, to accept as inevitable that a player with a certain level of talent can commit any degree of horrors and still be worth a roster spot and a multimillion dollar salary. When we hear pundits on television say that ‘Ray Rice doesn’t get a second chance because he’s no longer good at football’ and ‘Greg Hardy gets one because he can sack the quarterback,’ sports fans shrug and accept these assertions as logical reality, rather than challenging the cynical notion that certain sports heroes can be made by our willful disregard for their legal transgressions to be nearly literally invincible. We accept on face-value that a talent strong enough can bludgeon our sense of right and wrong, can pummel away our discomfort when we hear that a guy caught in a physical roadside altercation with a woman will face no repercussion, can cause us to maniacally cheer the kind of person who, in another profession and with a similar rap sheet, we wouldn’t let near our children.

We completely ignore that we have market value. In reduced terms, every athletic organization, both college and professional, survives primarily on two things: our eyes and our dollars. We control both. We can disseminate them, or not, pretty much as we please.

Greg Hardy doesn’t have to be on a professional football team. Skill doesn’t have to trump Severity. But we let it, with almost no fight.

Of course, though, people with spotted pasts, in any profession, can be redeemed and rehabilitated, can earn our compassion and respect as human beings. But in many cases involving professional athletes, we remove any incentive for the offending star to sincerely change his behavior, or even express remorse. Greg Hardy continues to behave like rotting garbage sludge because we’ve taught him a valuable lesson – that because he has Talent, he can behave this way with almost no meaningful consequence, and he’ll still be worthy of the $11 million dollar contract, he’ll still have the support of millions of screaming fans of one of the most popular sports franchises in the world, and he’ll still be considered by that franchise’s owner to be its leader.

This is obviously a dangerous precedent to set, especially on college campuses, where the caste system created by levels of talent is much differently arranged than in professional sports. For an overwhelming number of colleges and universities – even outside the power Division 1 conferences we typically associate with major college athletics – varsity sports, particularly football and basketball, can generate enormous revenue streams, both from avenues directly derived from the sport — like ticket and merchandise sales — to more indirect sources, like alumni donations, which for many schools rise and fall in tune with the success or failure of its sports teams. For this reason, a college athlete wields an enormous amount of power on his campus.

A college athlete’s authority is different, and much more terrifying, than a professional’s because the college athlete’s influence is often absolute. It often exists regardless of his current playing status, and therefore isn’t tied to proven levels of talent in the same way experienced by the professionals. Many college athletes, even good ones, don’t play at a starting level until their Junior and Senior years. But as Freshmen and Sophomores, before they’ve ever played enough to prove their on-field skill, the mere potential of their success has tangible value to the university. A redshirted prized recruit on his football team’s bench can wield as much or more power on his college campus than Greg Hardy possesses in the NFL.

Enter Jameis Winston, in 2012, in a redshirt year sitting out his freshman season at Florida State. On the night that the sexual assault to which he would become the prime suspect was reported (the initial report occurring the same night as the alleged attack, before the victim even knew Winston’s identity, which should debunk any hypothesis that the victim’s allegation was somehow fabricated as a profit-driven attack against a star athlete), Jameis Winston had never played a snap of college football.

When the lead detective assigned to the case, a part-time fundraiser for FSU athletics, decided essentially not to investigate, Jameis had not yet proven his actual ability in college-level competition. His status as a prize recruit – one of the best in the country – his value as potential was strong enough to shield him from serious legal scrutiny.

Speaking in an interview with the documentary ‘The Hunting Ground,’ Tallahassee prosecutor William Meggs repeated what has been his official stance regarding the Winston case: there simply wasn’t enough evidence to mount a prosecution, and that perhaps if an investigation had actually taken place — if DNA had been collected, surveillance tapes reviewed, cab drivers interviewed, the suspect himself properly interviewed – there may have been grounds to press charges.

He added one more line that we haven’t so far heard – “I think things that happened that night were not good.” Innocuous enough, but put that statement in context. Jameis Winston brought a girl home at one in the morning, and what happened afterward the city prosecutor is classifying as ‘not good,’ and the girl filed a sexual assault complaint almost immediately upon leaving the apartment.

An investigation never occurred, and a few years and a Heisman Trophy and National Championship later, 20,000 people flowed into Raymond James Stadium to cheer the Bucs’ first overall selection of Jameis Winston in the 2015 NFL Draft.

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This willful neglect has tangible consequences. It creates a precedent of immunity for offenders and thereby promotes continued victimization. When the New York Times released details of the flawed handling of the complaint against Winston, Winston’s infallibility as a talented athlete became a public lesson to athletes of all levels all across the country – If you’re good, you’ll get away with it. If you have skill, they won’t even try to catch you.

Unfortunately, this lesson was likely already ingrained. Just this weekend, the AP released a report detailing the favorable treatment that athletes at Florida State are receiving when investigated for sexual assault. Melissa Ashton, a former victim’s advocate employed by the university, said in a recent deposition that most of the victims of alleged sexual assault by FSU football players chose not to report the incident or follow through with the investigative process “a lot of times based on fear.”

This is terrifying, and it’s enabled by our deluded indifference.

When sports fans choose not to make a reasoned evaluation beyond “he’s on my team” of the athletes that they support, when we accept without scrutiny or pushback that Talent Trumps All, we send a clear and concerted message. We tell the front offices of our favorite teams that we don’t care. That they can continue to employ garbage humans and we’ll, beyond all reason, continue to cheer them and support them financially. More importantly, we send a message to the athlete himself – including those on college and high school campuses – that we’ll love him unconditionally. That whatever happens, we have his back. Keep the touchdowns coming, and we’ll keep looking the other way.

So to round back to this issue’s sweeping question – What is the public message transmitted by a fan who wears a Jameis Winston jersey? – the answer should make all of us as sports fans more than a little queasy.