I was half-listening to sports radio this morning when I heard something about former Giants running back Tiki Barber taking a dig at his old team, supposedly by labeling Kirk Cousins -- not his old teammate Eli Manning -- the best quarterback in the NFC East. I hadn’t heard anything about that, so I searched and found the source of the talk radio discussion, a post at USA Today‘s For The Win headlined, “Kirk Cousins is better than Eli Manning and Tony Romo, says Tiki Barber.”
Then I listened to the radio interview on which that USA Today headline is based, and there’s just one problem with it: It’s a complete misrepresentation of what Barber actually said.
Barber’s comments came in a January interview with 106.7 The Fan. Why USA Today decided to publish the January comments in June is unclear.
Even more unclear is why USA Today decided to misrepresent the question Barber was answering. Barber was asked, “If you were to take one quarterback out of the NFC East, Tiki, for the next five years, and that was going to be your guy for the next five years, who would it be?”
USA Today claimed that Barber “was asked who he had as the best quarterback in the NFC East.” That’s not what he was asked. Barber was asked who will be the best quarterback in the NFC East for five years in the future, not who is the best quarterback in the NFC East right now. Considering that five years from now Cousins will be 32, Manning will be 40 and Romo will be 41, it’s completely reasonable to conclude that Cousins will be the best quarterback in the NFC East over the next five years. Manning and Romo will probably be retired in five years.
Barber couldn’t have been any clearer about that in his answer. The first words out of his mouth were, “If you had asked me this two years ago, I would have said Eli.” Barber also said, “I love Tony Romo,” but added that at Romo’s age, Barber doesn’t know how much of a future Romo has. Only after explaining that he thinks Manning and Romo are likely to decline in their late 30s did Barber answer that he would pick Cousins as the best NFC East quarterback over the next five years, based on his age.
Somehow USA Today turned that into Barber having a “bad take” and claiming that Barber “doesn’t seem like he has all the facts” and that “Barber never passes up an opportunity to take a jab at Manning.”
Then it became a sports talk radio talking point, and Barber was unfairly pilloried for what were in fact completely reasonable comments that he made in an interview five months ago. Barber isn’t the one who deserves criticism in all this.
