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I’ve never really liked this, and on some levels don’t understand it. It’s really not their place . . .
During a media tour for Courtyard Marriott, Eric Decker was asked about free agent wide receiver Demaryius Thomas vis-à-vis the Jets. Thomas is a free agent this off-season.
“I’ve always been doing recruiting,” Decker said Friday to the Daily News. “For him, it’s a situation where he’s kind of waiting. If Denver’s going to franchise tag him or if they’re going to work out a long term deal… I’d love to have him suit up in a New York Jets uniform and be a teammate of mine. He’s one of the best receivers in this league and I always enjoyed, and it made it easier to play alongside someone like him.”
“I’ve been pushing for the entire year now,” Decker said in a telephone interview with The Post. “It was just another opportunity to talk to him about it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. I think it would be tough for Denver to let him go. So whether they franchise-tag him here in the next month or give him a long-term deal, he’s just one of those premier players in this league. If he happens to make it to free agency, I would love to sign him because playing alongside him for four years and especially the last two years made it a lot of fun and made it a lot easier. He’s just one of the great players in this league.”
First of all, let me get this out of the way. I like Decker personally, and think he did a solid job for the Jets this past season.
But I don’t love when players do this. It’s not their place.
His heart is in the right place, but perhaps this isn’t his role.
First of all, he has no idea what the free agent plans are of the Jets’ new brass.
Quite frankly, they don’t know what their plans are yet.
Those plans haven’t been formulated.
They have been in the building a couple of weeks, and they have been very busy working on staffing – interviewing and hiring coaches and personnel executives.
They also have a lot of film to go over, to assess the current roster.
So when Decker says, “I’ve been pushing for the entire year now,” I’m not sure exactly what he’s doing.
Pushing who? He doesn’t know what the plans were of the former regime, and now the current one.
Or when he says, “I’ve always been doing recruiting,” – recruiting for who?
The other issue I have with this is he’s lobbying for a player from the street to take the place of one of his compatriots in the receivers’ room.
Whether it’s Greg Salas, T.J. Graham, Shaq Evans, Quincy Enunwa, Chris Owusu – whoever you want to throw out there. When you say your team should sign a player at your position, you are indirectly pushing for a scenario, where somebody who you have been working closely with, will lose a spot.
Now before you question my mental health, of course I realize that Thomas is better than the players I named.
But let’s say you work at an accounting firm, and you are pushing for the firm to hire an accountant off the street, and that accountant will likely take the spot of an existing co-worker, who you actually like (the guys I named above are all good guys), is that right?
Players play, coaches coach, GMs find the players.
Players should stay out of this stuff.
The only time they should jump in, is if the team is actively recruiting a player in free agency, and the brass actually asks for their help to assist in closing the deal.
February 4, 2014
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