Bedard on Judon Situation: This Sort of Thing was Inevitable
Greg Bedard of BostonSportsJournal.com joined the Felger and Mazz program on Monday to discuss the latest from New England Patriots Training Camp, including the latest on the Matthew Judon contract situation.
Felger: What do you make of the Matthew Judon situation today?
Greg Bedard: Well, it’s a crap show. I mean, this was sort of inevitable. I mean, when you talk to some people around the league about “how are they going to do this..”, there was a lot of, let’s say apprehension about #1 – how the Patriots were handling their contracts – and also #2 – Jerod Mayo doing almost a complete 180 from Bill Belichick. And it comes with its buses and it comes with the minuses. One person I was talking to earlier today, they said that this kind of thing was inevitable, that, you know, you give too much too soon without establishing any type of process or authority and people are going to test the limits of all this. And sometimes they’re going to go over the line. You know, it’s just striking the way Bill dealt with these things. And I’m not saying that Jerod’s wrong, and I’m not saying that Bill was right, but we sort of dealt with this last year with Matthew Judon, but it didn’t turn into a circus. You know why? Because Bill probably talked to him and said, “look, do this. Handle your business this way. This is the way we’re going to do it, maybe don’t come out to practice. You know, if you come out, do XY and Z.” And all of a sudden, now under Mayo, Judon’s out there sitting on a trash can, he’s sitting on pads, like it’s just it’s a bad look. And I think that’s probably what a lot of Jerod’s conversation with him was about, “like, fine you want to do this, at least do it like a professional”. And that’s where we are.