EAGLES FIRE EMPLOYEE WHO COMPLAINED ABOUT DAWKINS’ DEPARTURE

For those of you who don’t reside in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love has featured a copious amount of brotherly hate in the wake of the local football team’s decision to allow long-time safety Brian Dawkins to leave via free agency. We’ve heard from various media types in Philly, who uniformly say that Dawkins’ departure provoked the harshest, loudest, and most negative reaction they’ve ever seen in response to anything the Eagles have done. It’s probably going to get even louder in the wake of the news that the team fired a game-day employee who voiced frustration with the move on his Facebook page. According to John Gonzalez of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dan Leone was let go last week, specifically as a result of something he typed onto the popular web site regarding the team’s decision not to bring Dawkins back. Specifically, here’s what he wrote: “Dan is [expletive] devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver. . . Dam Eagles R Retarted!!” (On the bright side, his spelling skills are slightly better than the average PFT commenter.) “I shouldn’t have put it up there,” Leone said. “I was ticked off, and I let my emotions go, but I didn’t offend any one person or target a specific individual. I was just upset that we lost such a great guy. Dawkins was one of my favorite players. I made a mistake.” Within two days, Leone heard from the team’s director of event operations, Leonard Bonacci. Bonacci told Leone that they “needed to talk” about the Facebook page, and Leone agreed. Two days later, guest services manager Rachel Vitagliano (are there any non-Italians in Philly?) fired Leone over the phone. “I tried putting in my case to Rachel,” Leone said. “I told her I worked there for six years. I did whatever they asked. I only missed one Eagles game the entire time I worked there . . . . I told her it was my dream to work for the Eagles and that I’d never do anything like that again.” Leone said Vitagliano didn’t want to hear it. He said that she told him he couldn’t be trusted, that the post made the team look bad, and that the only way to resolve the situation was to fire him. The Eagles’ response was this: “The only information we can share is that Dan was a seasonal game-day employee and not a full-time member of the Eagles staff.” Apparently, that same attitude applied to another “seasonal game-day employee” who wasn’t a full-time member of the team’s staff. Otherwise, Brian Dawkins would still be an employee of the franchise, too.