It wasn’t so long ago that Osi Umenyiora was implicitly calling his General Manager a liar.
An affidavit signed by Umenyiora as part of the antitrust case against the NFL was leaked to the media in attempt to make the NFL and G.M. Jerry Reese look bad.
When the lockout ended, Umenyiora didn’t show up to training camp in protest. That didn’t last long.
“Once I [made the decision] that OK, I’m going to play – I was like ‘I have to play!’ ” Umenyiora told Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports. “Attention had already been called to the [contract] situation. I knew I wasn’t gonna get what I wanted. To get it [after the season], I had to play, and I had to play well.”
The drama didn’t end there. A report emerged Umenyiora would “never” talk to Reese again. The two men spoke shortly thereafter. When the Giants wouldn’t trade Osi, the defensive end was “fuming.”
Umenyiora wound up calming down, but he missed seven games because of knee and ankle injuries. When he suffered a high ankle sprain in New Orleans, he thought his Giants career was about over.
“I was under the stadium, so I couldn’t see the game, but you could hear every time they scored. I still had painkillers in me from earlier, and the fact that it still hurt like it did was not good. Things were bad. Things were really, really bad. It’s just weird how things happen sometimes,” he told Silver.
Things are really good, at least for now. Umenyiora has 3.5 sacks in the playoffs. His dad is flying in from Nigeria for the Super Bowl to watch Osi play for the first time in his career.
Umenyiora remains under contract at a reasonable salary for another year. Umenyiora won’t make any predictions about what happens next, so we’ll make one for him: The Giants probably won’t give him a new deal and there is likely more offseason drama to come.
The Giants know these things usually work out in the end.