After Sunday’s loss to the Packers, Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher made clear his views regarding the external criticism of quarterback Jay Cutler.
On Monday, Bears safety Chris Harris made his views known during an appearance with Adam Schein and Rich Gannon of Sirius NFL Radio.
Harris started a little weak, with a mere “shame on them.” Then, Harris got rolling.
“You wanna talk about a guy who’s been sacked 52 times in a season and only missed one game, and you tell me he’s not tough,” Harris said. “For a guy who plays this game every week with diabetes and you tell me he’s not tough. It kind of rubs me the wrong way and pisses me off.
“Jay’s our quarterback, he’s our leader. We have all the faith in Jay, and we know how tough of a guy he is. So when guys on Twitter, all the ex-NFL players, the current NFL players are bashing him, it not only pisses me off, it pisses our entire team off. . . . If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be in the position that we’re in.”
Harris then took aim at others who have not played while injured, including Tom Brady, who left the 2001 AFC title game with an injury and Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew, who “missed the last two [games of the season] with injury while [his] team was still fighting for a playoff spot.”
He said “a lot of these guys” are “the pot calling the kettle black.”
“It’s easy to talk a bunch of crap when you’re on your couch watching us play for a chance to go to the Super Bowl,” Harris said. “So, I mean, it pisses me off.”
Harris then seemed to provide the explanation that justifies the conclusion by some, inaccurate as it may have been, that Cutler wasn’t really injured.
“Jay’s not perceived in the media as a good guy. He doesn’t give you the quotes that you want. He doesn’t show you the emotion that you want to see,” Harris said.
“But we know what type of guy he is, he fought with us all season long. So he doesn’t give the media what they want and so perception is real. And that’s one thing I learned in sociology class in college. Perception is real. If people perceive you one way, that’s what they think it is. They might not have a effing clue as to how you really are, but perception is real.”
Thus, while “perception is real,” perception in this case, according to Harris, is simply wrong. Given that he seems to understand why some people have an incorrect perception about Cutler, Harris arguably shouldn’t be pissed about it.