As the Cris Carter controversy continues, ESPN has issued a statement disavowing Carter’s comments -- which were initially published by ESPN, though without Carter’s name attached to them.
After Carter’s comments urging NFL players to get a “fall guy” to take the blame if they face legal trouble emerged today, ESPN said that those comments aren’t indicative of ESPN’s values.
“We completely disagree with Cris’s remarks and we have made that extremely clear to him. Those views were entirely his own and do not reflect our company’s point of view in any way,” ESPN’s statement said.
Carter works as an NFL analyst for ESPN, but his name was not mentioned in the ESPN article that started the controversy. In that article, a feature on former 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, it was stated only that a presentation by “two prominent retired players” rubbed Borland the wrong way because one of the retired players had told the NFL’s rookies that they should find a “fall guy” to take any legal heat off them. Borland declined to tell the authors of the article the name of the prominent retired player who said that.
But it was easy to find out that it was Carter because footage of the rookie symposium was available at NFL.com. The league’s own website had the video up for more than a year before removing it today. Now ESPN has joined the NFL in distancing itself from Carter’s comments.
