The Las Vegas Raiders have been a team in turmoil for most of their season, and now they’ve managed to tick off their best player. The Raiders want to shut down Pro Bowl defensive end Maxx Crosby due to an ongoing knee injury, but Crosby wants to play through it, and today he left the Raiders’ facility when the dispute came to a head.
“We talked when he was getting out of here,” Carroll said in a piece written by Charean Williams of Pro Football Talk. “He’s been fighting it so hard for so long. He’s been fighting this thing for nine weeks, whenever Kansas City was. Each week he has done everything you could possibly imagine a guy could do to play, and he’s been able to. They’ve worked with him to get through it. But after an evaluation we did Monday or Tuesday or whenever it was, it just looks too bad.
“He didn’t want to take the news like that. I didn’t want to take the news like that. So we just worked our way through to get to this point. He’s been practicing on Fridays. If we’d have let him, he’d have been out there, and he would not have hesitated, But he knows he’s banged up.”
Not surprisingly, Carroll doesn’t really see this as that much of a dispute. His viewpoint is relentlessly optimistic, as usual, and he said he had no problem with Crosby’s response.
“He knows that he's banged up, so he's talking about, 'I'd like to get out of here,’” Carroll said in a separate piece written by Ryan McFadden of ESPN. “And I said, 'Yeah, get out of here.' So, he took off," Carroll said. "...This didn't just spring on him. We've been talking about it, and it was exactly what you would think he would do, and he should do. I agree with him 1,000 percent on how he responded, and I [would have] responded the same way."
The Raiders have also ruled out tight end Brock Bowers and safety Jeremy Chinn for Sunday’s game against the New York Giants, and these actions mirror those of other teams that are out of the playoff hunt. Crosby, however, views himself as the ultimate warrior, and his logic is that if he was able to play through the injury before, he should be able to do it now.
Four conversations don’t seem to have done much to clear things up, though, that being the number of times Carroll talked with Crosby today.
"Hopefully, the right conclusion for his long betterment," Carroll said.