Brandon Boykin Writes about Being Traded by the Eagles in the Players Tribune
It’s not the first we’ve heard from Brandon Boykin post-Eagles, but he sat down with his thoughts and put them into more measured responses in writing over at the Player’s Tribune. There’s more to this than “[he] doesn’t understand grown men of our culture.”
Boykin starts by talking about how found out he was traded:
I was playing well year after year and not getting rewarded with more playing time, which was frustrating, but at the end of the day, Chip Kelly likes long-bodied corners, and I’m 5-foot-10. I can do everything I can on the field and my impact and my numbers could be great, but I can’t change my height. That’s what was holding me back in that system. So in the back of my mind, I kind of saw it coming.
I went upstairs and saw Chip. We went into his office and he closed the door.
“What did you trade me for?” I said. It was less of a “why” question and more about what they got in return, but I guess I wanted to know both.
He said the Steelers had been trying to get me for a while, but he kept turning down their trade offers. That day, as I was taking the field for conditioning tests, the Steelers called again, this time, offering a conditional fifth-round pick for me, and he couldn’t pass it up. He told me he thought it was a great opportunity for me. I wanted a bigger role, and I’d have that chance in Pittsburgh.
There was a lot I wanted to say, but I didn’t say it. It’s nothing personal against Chip, it’s just that it hurts when anybody tells you they don’t want you.
“Alright,” I said before a long pause. “… Cool.”
He spends a majority of the second half of the piece talking about his new team, the “Steeler way,” and his future. But he does stop to clarify, again, those things he said about Chip:
“You may have heard about the comments I made on my way out of Philly — comments that got taken a bit out of context. I have no ill will towards Chip, and definitely none towards the Eagles. Chip’s job is to build the best football team he can build — a team with players that fit his system and his vision to be competitive on the field — and I wasn’t a part of that vision. There’s not much more to it than that. That’s the NFL.”
Again, super sorry about what he said, he didn’t really mean it that way, and everything is cool. Cool?
The now black-and-yellow clad backup can’t say enough good things about Eagles fans:
“The thing I’ll miss most about Philly is the fans. We were 4-12 my rookie year, and they still packed The Linc for every single game and made it one of the loudest, craziest stadiums in the NFL … add in the fact that Philly was a great place to live and the whole city embraced me from the moment I got there, and I couldn’t have picked a better place to start my career. I loved every minute I spent there.”
We really dug you here too, and if you blow up and start doing really well across the state – even with limited play – you’ll remain a popular topic on sports talk radio. Really, isn’t that all you could ask for?