A player who thinks he has more than his fair share of critics in the media apparently thinks he has more than his fair share of critics among his colleagues.
Ranked 70th by other NFL players among the top 100 players in the league, Eagles quarterback Mike Vick didn’t like it. At all.
“That’s a joke,” Vick told Mike Missanelli of 97.5 The Fanatic in Philadelphia. “Maybe it was voted on by the peers, but I just disagree. I know how good I am and what I bring to the table for my football team, and the things that I can do on the football field sometimes can be uncanny. . . .
“I think the thing to do right now is just go prove why I feel like I should be even higher. So if that’s what they felt, and based on what happened last year, then I got to deal with it as motivation. So thank you because they’ve motivated me to be a better player this year.”
Vick was equally brash regarding his belief that the team has legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, and regarding his insistence that he won’t be doing anything differently on the field after a season of increased turnovers and decreased effectiveness.
“Nothing,” Vick said regarding possible adjustments. “I don’t think anything’s gonna change about my game.”
Nothing also will change about his Top 100 ranking, at least until next year. And as we pointed out in a recent edition of PFT Live, that’s the one potential benefit from this specific brand of space-filler programming on the league-owned network: It can put a chip on a guy’s shoulder, fueling improved performance in the coming season.