After an injury to Geno Smith put Ryan Fitzpatrick back under center for the Jets and the Jets won the game, Fitzpatrick launched into a scorched-earth “nobody believes in me” post-game monologue that overlooked his own role in his benching.
Four days later, Fitzpatrick would prefer that everyone stop talking about the things he said.
“I want it to die,” Fitzpatrick told Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News. “There’s no controversy inside this building about what was said. . . . All I was saying was that I believe in myself. I don’t think we need to hang on to that moment, [but] I know it will be hung on to forever. I just felt that it was something that I needed to say.”
While Fitzpatrick’s words will hardly echo into eternity, they’ll stick with him for as long as he’s in New York. Whether he likes it or not.
“I’m human,” Fitzpatrick told Mehta. “I have emotion. Even though my wife might not think so sometimes. Or even though I don’t show it a lot of the time. That was a very difficult situation for me, because I’m a human being. That was a lot of what I was trying to express in that postgame interview too. I’m not a robot even though a lot of times [it] seems like things don’t affect me. There is a human element to it.”
There definitely is a human element, and I always prefer honest, authentic reactions to the standard, canned, lather/rinse/repeat crap. Still, real can also be compelling and/or ironic. Fitzpatrick’s effort to shift blame for his poor performances was both, and nothing he says is going to get people to stop thinking and talking about it.
