OAKLAND — “He didn’t want to play.”
“I mean, I guess his initiative was to come out there and fight today, I guess it wasn’t to play football.”
The words of Will Parks and Chris Harris Jr., respectively, outlined the feelings the Denver Broncos had towards Michael Crabtree following their seventh straight loss, a loss that saw team captain Aqib Talib get ejected from the contest early in the first quarter after an all-out brawl that started between he and Crabtree.
The news and the highlight shows will show Talib and Crabtree throwing haymakers and pile-ups of multiple players from both teams, but what they may not show is the play before, the play that has the Broncos dropping all of the blame for the incident on Crabtree.
“He just sucker punched me,” Harris explained. “I have never seen that in the NFL.”
On a run play that the two players were not involved in, Crabtree hit Harris with an uppercut to the stomach, knocking the wind out of him and leaving on the ground. When Harris got up and pointed to the Raiders sideline, everybody in the building knew something was about to go down.
“Chris is the furthest thing from a dirty player,” safety Justin Simmons explained. “Chris is one of the most genuine guys I’ve ever met. For him, he was walking off the field mad, pissed, looking at the sideline yelling and so you knew something was wrong… Aqib took that personally, I don’t know what happened on their side, Crabtree lined up on his side, and Aqib said he tried to do the same thing to him, and obviously Aqib is a little bit—not as [kind] as Chris when it comes to that type of stuff and so he took things into his own hands.”
Say what you will about Talib reacting the way he did—Broncos head coach Vance Joseph called it “silly,” “nonsense,” and “unacceptable”—but the player who deserved the most blame is Crabtree, who—in a cowardly move—went after the smaller and less aggressive member of the Broncos secondary, not to mention a player who had nothing to do with the origin of the issue.
“To come up and punch someone in the stomach while a play is going is unnecessary and it’s unprofessional… I don’t know why he would do that.”
Chris Harris knows why.
“I guess it was because we’ve shut him down pretty good every game since he’s been here, so I guess he just wanted to come out fighting today.”
If you can’t beat ’em, brawl ’em.
