Now that defensive lineman Richard Seymour has joined the Raiders, he’s acting like he wanted to be there all along, and that the delay in showing up for work resulted solely from the fact that he was “blindsided” by the trade.
“Since I got the call that I was being traded, my life’s really been a
whirlwind,” Seymour said Saturday night at a press conference introducing him as a member of the team. “I’ve
really been blindsided by the events that took place. I didn’t expect it. I
didn’t understand what was going on. So it’s like when something happens, when
you’re blindsided, you have to step back and realize what situation you’re in.”
Though the notion that he was “blindsided” meshes with our report that news of the trade came at a time when he thought progress was being made toward a new contract with the Patriots that would have extended his stay beyond 2009, he at least knew that a trade was possible.
“I talked to him months ago and he felt like this was on the horizon,”
former Pats teammate Ty Warren said in the wake of the deal. “With this being his last year, his cap number, all the
stuff . . . pretty much the writing on the wall. He knew it was on the
horizon, he just didn’t know how it was going to come.”
Here’s the bottom line. If Seymour welcomed the opportunity to play for the Raiders, he wouldn’t have spent all week dragging his feet, and he never would have filed a grievance challenging the Raiders’ ability to give him a “show up in five days or play for no one this year” letter.
In the end, something happened on Friday night to get him to come to terms with the fact that he had signed a contract, that under the rules of the NFL that contract can be traded by the team to any other team at any time, and that he had no real options or leverage.
So now that Seymour has accepted his fate, he’s not going to kick and scream and scratch and claw. He’s going to whip up a batch of lemon salad, and he’s going to try not to pucker while he eats it.