Titans tight end Chase Coffman, who was fined $30,000 for hitting Ravens assistant coach Tony Coaxum on the sideline last week, says it was an accident.
Coffman said after Monday night’s game against the Steelers that he reached out to Coaxum and that Coaxum accepted his explanation that there was no ill-intent on their sideline collision.
“We’ve talked about it and we’re both past it,” Coffman said, via Paul Kuharsky of ESPN.com. “I would never go after someone intentionally to try to hurt them.”
Titans coach Ken Whisenhunt defended Coffman and believes Coffman’s explanation.
“In fact he tried to find the coach after the game to apologize and reached out to them,” Whisenhunt said. “I guess they chose to go ahead, and that’s unfortunate. But nobody’s approached him about his side of it. If you look at it, if you see the whole play, he was trying to stop and inadvertently ran into him.”
Video of the incident sure looks bad, and the NFL obviously thinks Coffman did something wrong. But Coffman has a reputation as a good man, and it’s hard to understand why he would just suddenly decide to level Coaxum for no reason. People in football like to say that the tape doesn’t lie, but this could have been a case of the tape being deceiving.