NFL Coach Goes Off on His Own Player for Talking About Injury - 'He Should Keep His Mouth Shut'
The NFL of late has been a quagmire of labor relations, with owners and coaches trying to impose order and discipline on players who are becoming increasingly emboldened as individuals to try and speak their minds in public.
That can come at a a high price to the player, of course. Former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick hasn’t been employed since the 2016 season when he kicked off the national anthem protests that are dogging the league to this day.
But that’s politics. You wouldn’t normally expect managerial backlash against a player discussing his own health with the media, but when it’s the New York Jets, no authoritarian coaching overreach is too absurd.
Wide receiver Terrelle Pryor suffered an ankle injury in an offseason workout in May. In an interview with reporters on Monday, Pryor broke the news of just how serious that ankle injury was, according to the New York Post.
Coach Todd Bowles flipped out on Pryor, saying, “I feel he should keep his mouth shut and leave the injuries to me.”
Trouble is, if we left the injuries to Bowles and the Jets, what we’d have is a case of the team deliberately lying to media and getting away with it.
As the Post reported, the team described Pryor’s situation as requiring surgery to clean up problems related to an injury in the 2017 season that tore three ligaments in his ankle. Pryor, who was with the Washington Redskins at the time, was still able to play, though his effectiveness was reduced. Surgery in November ended his season early, The Washington Post reported.
On Monday, Pryor set the record straight about what happened in May.
While in June he said he’d sustained a “a minor injury” in training, what he really meant was that he’d broken his ankle.
The second surgery in eight months that he had on it was not because of the unrelated injury that ended his 2017 campaign. Instead, it was to fix the more-severe-than-described injury he suffered in the spring.
On Monday, Pryor told the Post that, “Right now, I’m just chasing perfection of my craft and trying to get back to where I know I should be. I’m still trying to get healthy. I had two surgeries in eight months so it’s a blessing that I’m even on the field, being able to compete, making plays. That’s a blessing.”
Which, in turn, brings up a lot of questions about why Bowles would downplay the injury to his new wide receiver. Simply telling the truth would have given Bowles a much easier out in case Pryor underperforms in his efforts to come back.
Bowles has coached the Jets to consecutive 5-11 seasons, and it’s hard to imagine that he’s not starting the season on the hot seat, a couple of early losses away from being fired.
Tensions like these are a telltale symptom of the old “the coach has lost the locker room” narrative.
Pryor joined the Jets after having suffered through an awful season with the Redskins in 2017. He had just 20 catches for 240 yards and a touchdown before the surgery on that other unrelated ankle injury put the kibosh on his season.
The Jets are hoping that with rookie sensation Sam Darnold throwing him the ball, Pryor will show something closer to the form he showed in Cleveland, where he caught 77 balls for 1,007 yards and four trips to the end zone in 2016.
But for a guy the Jets have put such high hopes on, to undermine their credibility with him by his coach starting a public media fight is…well, if nothing else, it’s the most Jets thing possible that they could do.
The team has had one winning season since its last AFC Championship appearance back in 2010. Since then, it’s had a literal Butt Fumble and more than a few metaphorical butt fumbles as a franchise, so this is just one more.
Pryor is competing for playing time with Robby Anderson, Jermaine Kearse, and Quincy Enunwa, and while he’ll miss this week’s preseason game, he will get a chance to show what he can do on Aug. 24 against the Jets’ fellow stadium tenant, the Giants.
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