Couple of weekend tweets about Carson Wentz, sourced to a TV appearance from ESPN NFL reporter Jeff Darlington:

Alright I’ve got some thoughts here:

  1. We’ve been over the leadership thing before. Carson is supposedly a selfish asshole and all of that, blah blah. There were Eagles fans who couldn’t wait to smash the RT button when they saw those two tweets above, but I’d defer to Chris Long and Malcolm Jenkins, who actually played with Wentz, and explained that he wasn’t a locker room cancer. They said they wished Carson had made more of an effort to reach out to different parts of the locker room, an ingratiate himself with his teammates, but he didn’t, and that was something he needed to work on.
  2. Actual quote from Chris Long on Wentz: “The coachability and stubbornness, he ain’t the only player, but we expect something more out of a quarterback. Right? That’s the bottom line. He’s not the only quarterback who is stubborn. This has existed as this extreme conversation when, he’s got things to fix, but I don’t remember ever thinking, ‘what an asshole.”
  3. Quote from T.Y. Hilton in a recent Athletic article: “We’re just behind him, man, no matter what, good or bad. We’re always going to have his back. I just appreciate him, man, appreciate his toughness, his hard work, the way he dedicates himself to his craft. He’s good in my book.” 
  4. Frank Reich knew Carson Wentz from their time together in Philadelphia. If there were real concerns about his leadership qualities, he and GM Chris Ballard never would have traded for him in the first place. So either Carson magically developed into a selfish weirdo in 2018 or Reich miscalculated here.
  5. Jonathan Taylor recently said “I definitely think Carson is staying” and seemed to speak highly of him. He’s not the GM, but still.
  6. Carson is an anti-vaxxer, but he wasn’t the only NFL player who didn’t get the shot. Maybe Colts players thought that was selfish, but only they can answer that question.

I get it, everybody here hates Wentz, ESPECIALLY Bob Wankel and Joe Giglio, who are the first two on Twitter whenever a Wentz report appears. Everybody wants to jerk off to every negative thing about the former Eagles quarterback. But Chris Long is right about the “extreme” nature of Wentz conversation, and we’re painting this dude as if he’s Vladimir Putin rolling tanks into Luhansk. He’s not Putin. He is a league-average quarterback who threw 27 touchdowns and 7 interceptions this season for a team that liked to run the ball. The stuff I read about Wentz, it’s like people think he’s Jake Fromm or Garrett Gilbert.

It’s a little weird to see him thrown under the bus after one 9-8 season in Indy. Yeah, they choked, and the QB gets the brunt of the blame, but if you watched that season finale against the Jaguars, the entire Colts team was flat. They ran Jonathan Taylor on 4th and 2 and got one yard. The defense let Trevor Lawrence score four times in five drives. They all stunk, yet Wentz is apparently the worst person on the planet and radiates more toxicity than Chernobyl. That’s my second Eastern Europe reference in one story.

The truth is that Wentz just doesn’t have “it,” and when we say “it,” we mean that clutch gene or infectious moxie. He doesn’t seem to rise to the occasion or respond well to adversity. I don’t think he’s a douchebag; he just lacks some of those undefinable traits that Nick Foles and Jalen Hurts have.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Carson Wentz “stan,” it’s just that Eagles fans hate the guy so much that they can’t even call it rationally anymore. It’s totally laughable reading this stuff on Twitter. Wentz isn’t Aaron Rodgers but he’s not Ben DiNucci either. He’s not Gandhi, but he’s also not King Joffrey. Carson won 11 regular season games during the Super Bowl year and played a role in finally getting this city a championship. His play that season put Foles in a great position to secure home field and then finish the job. That can never be disputed, ever. If you wanna have seething hatred for somebody who also quit, but didn’t finish the job, then direct your ire toward Ben Simmons. We’re treating Wentz and Simmons like the same person, but only one played for a Philly team during a title-winning season.

Thank you. The end.