Bills defensive end Mario Williams said after beating the Jets that he thinks his opponents were disrespectful. He did not say he was motivated to beat the Jets because they took a Saturday night trip to Dave & Buster’s in Buffalo.
The New York Post published a column suggesting that the Bills were motivated by the Dave & Buster’s excursion, and that the Jets had provided fuel to the team that defeated them. That column quoted Williams saying, “Me personally, I feel it was disrespectful. I take my nephew to Dave & Buster’s.”
One problem: That’s not what Williams said. What Williams said was that he considers the Jets to be a disrespectful bunch on Sundays, regardless of whatever they do on Saturday night.
“Me personally, I feel like they’re disrespectful in the first place,” Williams actually said, as noted by Deadspin, which posted the audio of Williams’s comments.
Williams did say he takes his nephews to Dave & Buster’s, but that was a separate statement from the opinion that the Jets are disrespectful. In fact, contrary to the New York Post suggestion that the Bills were motivated by the Jets’ Saturday night team-bonding experience, Williams said he found out about it only after the game, when members of the media began pressing the motivational angle when interviewing Bills players in the locker room.
“I didn’t hear about it until just a few minutes ago, actually,” Williams said after the game, in a quote that didn’t make it into the New York Post column.
So, no, Williams did not say he was fired up to beat the Jets because they showed they were taking the Bills lightly with their Saturday night outing, or anything else along those lines. Williams calling the Jets disrespectful makes for a perfectly good post-game quote. There was no reason to turn that quote into something it wasn’t.