Odell Beckham Opened Up To GQ About How He Thought The Giants Disrespected Him, How He Kept The Team Relevant, And Blah Blah Blahhhh I Honestly Don't Care Anymore
Congratulations NFL fans, we have finally made it to late July, which means the season is officially around the corner. Training camps are opening up, fantasy previews are available for purchase, and stories about the unhappy marriage between Odell Beckham and the Giants are making headlines!
Wait a minute…
*Checks the New York (Football) Giants roster*
Oh yeah, that’s right. I knew I read in the paper that Odell Beckham was no longer on the Giants. Yet here we are talking about Odell Beckham and the Giants. Again. It’s all I see on my timeline and it’s gonna continue getting regurgitated on TV until either a star pulls up lame in training camp (Reminder: Nothing good ever happens in the preseason) or another Odell article comes out.
Now to be fair to GQ, this article was the first article I have heard about Beckham and the Giants in days, maybe even weeks. And I won’t give Odell any shit for simply answering the questions he was asked. But goddamn this is the most drawn out breakup in the history of breakups.
As for today’s article, here were the splashy quotes.
1. Odell felt disrespected that the New York Giants weren’t honest with him because he was the reason the New York Giants brand was still alive and getting primetime games.
But how’d you feel in that exact moment?
My initial reaction was not disappointment.… I felt disrespected. Like, after everything I’ve done for them. This is me being honest: This team has not been good for the last six years. Period. Even the year we went to the playoffs and everyone was talking about this and that. And we went there, and I didn’t have a great playoff game. Don’t get me wrong, I had a terrible game. But I left the game with seven targets, and I’m supposed to be your number one receiver. I left the game with seven targets. We lost. They scored 40 points. It’s just all bad. I felt disrespected, because I felt like I was a main reason at keeping that brand alive. They were getting prime-time games, still, as a 5-and-11 team. Why? Because people want to see the show. You want to see me play. That’s just real rap. I’m not sitting here like, “It’s because of me.” But let’s just be real. That’s why we’re still getting prime-time games. I felt disrespected they weren’t even man enough to even sit me down to my face and tell me what’s going on.
Now there are two ways to interpret this quote. One is that the 2018 Giants had four prime-time games last year with Beckham, Olivier Vernon, Landon Collins, and any other star Dave Gettleman shooed out of town that I’m forgetting about for a team that had an Over/Under win total of 6.5 compared to the three prime time games they have that will feature Saquon Barkley trying to battle eleven man fronts for a team with much less star power and an Over/Under win total of 6 this season.
Also, the things everyone was talking about before that playoff game that Odell laid an egg in was that goddamn boat picture that was a bad idea the MILLISECOND Victor Cruz published it.
Again, I don’t know if those numbers are telling me fibs, but it says in the box score that Odell actually had 11 targets in that game. Maybe Odell got the amount of drops he had confused with targets, because to be honest it felt like he had about seven drops during that game.
Oh yeah and the other story that the media ran with was Odell punching a hole in the FROZEN DRYWALL OF LAMBEAU FIELD
An NFL player being mad at a loss and punching a hole in a wall is pretty tame compared to some of the nightmarish shit we read about in that league, as well as the neverending rollercoaster of a relationship Odell took us on with a fucking kicking net.
But coverage like that, along with primetime games your shitty team may not deserve, are what comes with playing for that big city.
You will also never guess which member of the Giants that Odell felt disrespected by.
Who, specifically, is “they”? The G.M.?
The G.M. And I’ll forever have respect for [Giants president and CEO] Mr. Mara. Everything he’s ever done for me, he’s shown nothing but love. Even when we were having our talks, it was coming from a place of love. I could always feel it. So I’ll forever have respect for him. But then to be called like that and then be texted by your coach and be like, “Oh, yeah, I heard the news.” Yeah, you heard the news? It happened because of you. The reason I’m gone is because of you. It was just tough because of the way I initially felt. On the other side of it, I was excited about a new start because I had been—honestly, I had been praying to God the season before this season for a change.
Wow, a star player was upset with Dave Gettleman after DG shipped him out of town. Where have I heard that before?
If Odell has any axes to grind with Gettleman, he can get in line behind about 10 million Giants fans as well as whatever ex-Panthers are still holding grudges.
But the craziest part was Odell complaining about all that after saying he didn’t even want to play in New York anymore.
You felt like you just couldn’t play there anymore.
I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t do it. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t in a good place. And like I told you earlier, I feel like everything is about happiness, and I just was not.
Not only did he want to move on from the Giants last year but he was close to retiring two years ago because it was all too much.
No way. You really thought about retiring? For real?
Twenty-four years old. Just off it. To love something so much to a place where it is my everything, and to watch it be tainted, or all kinds of things be in the middle of it. Like, it hurt me to my soul. It be like loving someone and putting them on such a level to where life is about them and you love that person through anything. Through the good, the bad. And to watch them do something so heinous and vulgar. Something just so, like, almost unforgivable. You still love them, but it’s, like, Wow.
So Odell wanted to leave New York so badly that he almost said goodbye to the dream of playing in the NFL and being paid millions of dollars to do it? If I wanted to work somewhere other than Barstool to the point I was contemplating retiring from the smut blog and Portnoy traded me, I wouldn’t care if I heard that news through text, phone call, the Barstool reddit page, or a Deke Zucker tweet. Don’t get me wrong, they will have to take this job from my cold, dead hands when we have HQ4 on the moon. But if Portnoy didn’t sit me down beforehand because he didn’t want anything to leak, I think I’d be fine with it (outside of being massively underqualified for whatever company I was at now). The one part of the comparison that doesn’t work is I am nowhere close to the Odell Beckham of Barstool. Zak DeOssie, maybe. But definitely not Odell Beckham.
Here’s the thing. I loved having Odell Beckham on my team. He was a great player, super fun to watch, and the coolest person in the NFL if not the entire world. Guys like that are AWESOME to root for. But it truly was always some sort of nonsense that happened with him. A lot of it was due to the haters, who all started chirping from the minute he made that one-handed catch against the Cowboys. Myself and a lot of other Giants fans defended pretty much everything he did because it was blown out of proportion so much. But some of it was Odell allowing quotes to be taken out of context or published in general because he did things like showing up to an interview with Lil Wayne right before the season started. I honestly wish him the best in Cleveland because Browns fans and Odell deserve to have a good team around them. But holy fuck, I cannot wait for these stories about Odell feeling disrespected by the Giants to disappear, which will be about 5 years after he is inducted to Canton or until he says he isn’t interested in talking about the past anymore. So I guess this will continue until 2035.
