As the players walked off the field following the Giants’ 10-7 win over the Patriots on Sunday, Patriots safety Jabrill Peppers made some negative comments about his own team.
In one exchange that Peppers didn’t realize could be picked up by the media microphones on the field, Peppers said to Giants running back Saquon Barkley, “You lucky we ass.”
Today, Peppers apologized for what he said, saying there are frustrations with the Patriots’ disappointing season but that he wasn’t attempting to denigrate his teammates or coaches.
“First of all I just want to apologize to my teammates and the coaches for even having to answer questions like that,” Peppers said. “We’ve got more important things to worry about than me being caught on a hot mic. But at the end of the day, we’re 2-9, we got a Top 5 pick in the draft that didn’t come through a trade. We all know the standard, we all know what it’s supposed to look like, and it’s not that right now. That’s not a shot at anybody in the locker room. I said ‘we.’ We own that. I own that. We have good players, great players, in the locker room, but every team has great players. There’s great parity across the league. And if those great and good players aren’t executing, that team isn’t a good team. But that doesn’t speak to the character of men we’ve got in this locker room. We call come to work willing and ready to do whatever we can to help this team win. The ball hasn’t been rolling in our favor and that’s on no one but us.”
Peppers is certainly not the only one in the Patriots’ locker room who’s frustrated with how bad they’ve been this year, and he’s probably not the only one who has made such comments. But he’s the only one whose comments became public, and it’s to his credit that he stood up and took responsibility for what he said.
