At least Myles Garrett has the benefit of uncertainty. What Thomas Davis just said recently about a Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback was indefensibly stupid. This wasn’t even naivety, a simply a dumb, ill-informed, foolish thing to say.
Los Angeles Chargers linebacker Thomas Davis, a player who started out his career missing three different seasons due to three different ACL tears, was recently on NFL Network as a guest, and he participated in a segment about whether or not fans should be confident in Ben Roethlisberger’s return from injury in 2020.
Instead, he used this time to express a completely stupid opinion in suggesting that, rather than the obvious fact that Roethlisberger can’t actually throw a football without seriously risking severe re-injury, the 16-year veteran who continued to play a game after having his face smashed in decided to quit on his team, somehow believing that he could actually play as a quarterback with a torn up throwing elbow.
I don’t recall anybody questioning Davis’ integrity about why he wasn’t on the field when he was tearing up his knee every year. Perhaps a linebacker can play through a torn up elbow. Perhaps a quarterback can play through an ACL tear. Philip Rivers once did. But it’s impossible to play quarterback and throw the ball when your elbow is severely damaged.
Oh yeah, here’s what Davis said, and what everybody has been talking about:
I look at the injury, and from my perspective, as a player who has played this game for a while and has gone through a ton of injuries, if there’s something that I can possibly play with, I’m gonna try to do it. I know the quarterback, your elbow, that’s a little different, but we kind of heard that Ben could come back and play.
The Steelers defense did a great job last year of keeping them in the playoff hunt, and he could’ve come back and he could’ve been a part of that playoff run, possibly, but he chose not to.
I just think that he kind of looked at the roster and the way things started out last year and he kind of gave up on the team, in my opinion.
To the best of my knowledge, Davis has not since issued any sort of apology, let alone a retraction, for this irresponsible and insulting commentary about a fellow professional football player. He may well be the only person in the world who disputes the seriousness of an elbow injury to the throwing arm of a person who throws an object hundreds of times professionally every year.
For the bulk of his career, Davis has been a well-respected individual both on and off the field, but for such reckless comments, essentially questioning somebody’s character and integrity, he should certainly feel compelled to, at the very least, try to back up his stance if he still believes it, or issue a retraction if he has come to the realization about how phenomenally wrong he is.
