The initial narrative went like this: LeSean McCoy danced too much and cost too much and he had to go. That was the explanation when Chip Kelly shipped the franchise’s all-time leading rusher to Buffalo. It is up to you how much of that was honest and how much was spin and how much you should believe. But if any of that was true, so is this: McCoy and DeMarco Murray are, at least outwardly, very different people.
That’s not a judgment, and it’s not a binary statement about one guy being good and the other guy being bad. It’s not an endorsement or denunciation of either man. It’s merely a cursory observation. Considering they both do the same thing for a living, and they’ve both had outrageous success doing their jobs, they project much different images.
Since leaving Philadelphia, McCoy has attracted a lot of attention. Very little of it has been positive. Purposefully or not, he sparked a conversation about race by using his former head coach for kindling — then he stepped away from the flames and refused to discuss his part in the firestorm.
Since arriving in Philadelphia, Murray has tried to avoid attention. His post workout interviews are often brief and measured. He went on the record and said he disagreed with McCoy’s comments relating to race. And Murray responded to his former teammate’s jab. But those remarks were fairly innocuous. Murray recently granted a longer interview to CSNPhilly and adopted the same approach. He gave carefully considered answers that won’t cause any controversy and probably won’t be remembered for too long, either.
Asked about why Sam Bradford, his often-injured college friend and teammate, is the right quarterback for this team, Murray called him “smart and instinctive” but said it was “up to the coaches to decide” and then “see where it goes from there.”
He called Kelly a “smart X’s and O’s man” who knows “what kind of player he wants.” When Murray came to Philly, partly because of that X’s and O’s man and the curiosity surrounding every move Kelly makes, Murray was hounded by reporters and fans, and a helicopter followed him to the NovaCare Complex. Did Murray realize what a media circus the Eagles have become?
“I didn’t,” he said simply. Then he called the Eagles “one of the premiere organizations around the league” and explained that he and his family are “happy to be here.”
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Byron Maxwell predicted the Eagles would go to the Super Bowl. Murray said “hopefully he’s right” — which is as close to an endorsement or bulletin board material as you’re likely to get from him. He qualified it by adding that “it’s easier said than done.”
If Murray is a tough man to crack, it sometimes felt like we could see all of McCoy’s fissures (and faults). We were witness to the unfortunate Twitter fight with the mother of his child. We learned about the bus incident and the tipping to-do.
But if that was the dark and unsightly part of his personality, there was also a brighter, friendlier side to McCoy at times. More than once I saw him pose for pictures with fans at training camp and throw his arm around someone when he could have just hit the locker room. He could be funny, too. A year ago, when he was talking about losing weight and not eating chips and dip any longer, he turned to a reporter that he clearly liked and quipped “you should try it.” Everyone laughed.
None of which is meant to excuse McCoy’s boorish behavior. If there were times when he was likable (and there were), there were so many other times when he wasn’t. Like a lot of athletes, like a lot of people, how much he opened up and what he showed you publicly depended on the day.
Again, none of this is meant to promote one man or demote the other. We spent years getting to know McCoy — insofar as you can ever really know a professional athlete in a work environment, which is to say not well. We’ve only recently been introduced to Murray. For the most part, Murray has managed to avoid any off-field flaps (though there was a strange and underreported saga with a former teammate). Who knows how our perception of him might change over time? For now, he feels like the inverse of McCoy in many ways. And that’s fine. It isn’t right or wrong. It just is.