Football fans often assume that NFL players are football fans, too. Many aren’t.
The latest example comes from Lions rookie cornerback Darius Slay, who according to Robert Klemko of Peter King’s TheMMQB.com believed that the name of the place where the Packers play football referred to something else entirely.
“Lambo? Like the car?” Slay said.
While a “Lambo” is roughly as hard to come by as a season ticket to games at Lambeau Field, that’s where the connection ends.
Defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham defended Slay against the perception that Slay’s NFL IQ is inversely proportional to his physical skills.
“If you talk to him about football, he was really well-coached,” Cunningham told Klemko. “This kid knew the game coming in. I kept quizzing him. He knew things that a lot of coaches don’t know.”
But Slay doesn’t need to be defended on this point. So what if the name “Lambeau Field” didn’t ring a bell? It’s not like he went to college in the home state of one of the greatest players in franchise history. (Oh, wait.)
Regardless, Dolphins quarterback Ryan Tannehill demonstrated last year during Hard Knocks that he has no clue regarding the divisional alignment of the league’s 32 teams, putting the Chiefs in the NFC East and the Giants in the NFC North. And Donovan McNabb didn’t know, during his 10th NFL season, that a regular-season NFL game can end in a tie.
So if anyone is going to criticize Slay for not knowing about Lambeau Field, he’d hardly be the only guy with an NFL dunce cap on top of his NFL helmet.