Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby is unhappy about being shut down by the Raiders due to his knee issues, and he’s speaking out about it. Moreover, Crosby is getting personal in his comments, to the point where he went on Sirius XM’s Let’s Go! Podcast, which is hosted by Jim Gray, and discussed his desire to keep playing through his injuries.
“For me, my love for the game has been since the day I started, since I could remember,” Crosby told Jim Gray via an article written by Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. “My whole life has been football and sports. That has been my obsession since I was a little kid. Yeah, I’ve always — I mean, I’m an addict to the core. I’ve had an obsessive mindset and that addictive personality my whole life.
“But when it comes to football, there’s certain things that I truly believe in, and I feel like there’s core principles that you gotta live by, and there’s a certain way the game needs to be played. And there’s a certain approach that you have when you go into the field. And the way you look at it, from my perspective, is you play to win. You play for your teammates, you put everything you have into the game, no matter what it is. There’s gonna be bumps and bruises. You’re gonna be banged up. That is a part of the game and the nature of the beast.”
Crostby’s comments about his devotion to the game aren’t unexpected, but what’s especially bizarre about this series is that Fox analyst and Raiders minority owner Tom Brady is one of the co-hosts of the show and a central figure in founding it. Given that, shouldn’t he be having a more active role in this controversy, rather that providing a platform for Crosby?
“I never wanna look back and say I wish I would’ve, or I should’ve, done this,” Crosby added. “I’m all in, and I’ve been all in since day one, and everybody that’s with me on a daily basis knows my approach to this game. They could say I might be on edge. Sometimes I might be.
“But at the end of the day, they know my intentions. And when you have real relationships and you lead by action instead of words, when you go out there and show the guys, this is how we do it, this is how you work, and you prove it every day, that holds a lot more weight than words. Yeah, I love the game, man. This is my whole life.”
That may be true, but we still don’t know if Crosby now wants to be traded as a way to terminate his relationship with the Raiders. And as Florio points out, that question remains unasked due to some shoddy interviewing by Gray, who gave up his journalistic integrity a long time ago to service and kowtow to celebrity athletes like Brady.