The recent ESPN The Magazine article that detailed friction inside the Seahawks’ locker room has drawn the ire of Richard Sherman, who was portrayed as a leader of a faction on the team that didn’t see eye-to-eye with quarterback Russell Wilson.
Sherman blasted any anonymous sources who talked to author Seth Wickersham in an interview with USA Today, and even suggested with no evidence that Wickersham could have made up the quotes that painted Sherman in a negative light.
“He asked a few questions to a few cowardly people,” Sherman said. “And I’ll be calling you cowards if you’re afraid to put your name on it. If you have a comment, if you’ve got something to say, you’ve got something to ask or something and you’re not willing to put your name on it, you’re kind of a coward. But maybe they’re not cowards and maybe these people never existed. Because who knows? You don’t even have to exist. You don’t have to prove anything in this world anymore.
“And that’s what I mean when I say there are a lot of TMZ-like media going on because guys like this — nobody is going to ever question him if they come to find out, hey, he could have fabricated this whole story and, I mean, outside of him saying there was an interaction at practice, none of the rest of it was true. But heck, what did he have to lose? I think it’s really unfortunate that’s it’s come to that.”
Despite Sherman’s anger about the way he was portrayed, the substance of Wickersham’s article hasn’t really been questioned. The information in Wickersham’s article was consistent with the Seahawks’ decision to consider trading Sherman this offseason, and coach Pete Carroll didn’t question the article’s veracity, he merely referred to it as “old news.”
It’s understandable that Sherman wishes people who talk about him in the press would put their names on their comments, but that doesn’t mean those sources weren’t telling the truth.