The Weatherford Affair

Player  / Not A Player

So the kerfluffle this week in my part of the world, assuming that you are not paying attention to the Phillies (and honestly, I'm pretty sure that no one locally has paid attention to that dumpster fire for years now)... was Giants P Steve Weatherford daring to give a remarkably accurate assessment to the Eagles' muddled QB situation.

Which led to Eagles C Jason Kelce grousing that Weatherford was particularly unqualified to talk trash, seeing how his position was protected from contact. (Nice money quote: "Interviewing punters is a thing now?") Weatherford backed down from the statement, again in a highly even-handed way, all the while freely admitting that the Eagles were completely correct to react in the way that they did to his words.

Now, I get that all of this is Not Game, and that it is happening in one of the few weeks of the entire goddamned year that you can actually be free of the NFL. This should be the time that we're taking MLB attendees to task for allowing the remarkably over-the-top KC Fans to hijack a meaningless game, or engaging in pointless speculation about NBA free agents. And yet, here we are in the muck of this silliness, which the world will little note nor long remember, assuming someone on the Eagles STs fails to take a run at Weatherford in a game, or if Weatherford just avoids punter calamity during said game.

I'm still taking time with it for one reason, though... and that's the man without a country status of Weatherford, and what hypocrites the world is when it comes to athlete trash talk.

If Weatherford was a civilian, or even an ex-player, he might not have gotten press attention in the first place... but it's also unlikely that Kelce displays even the trace element of butthurt shown here. If Weatherford was a trench player, it would get play for the week or so, and be more or less part of the usual Giants-Eagles brouhaha. But only because he's in the netherworld of neither fish nor fowl -- not quite civilian, not quite Real Football Player -- we get to more or less dismiss what he said, because of who he is.

Well, he's not wrong. Any team is doomed with QB3, just as any team that has a decision to make between QB1 and QB2 is likely to have A Problem. Weatherford might have said this indelicately, and it may not have been his place to say.

But he's not *wrong*...