Receiver Roddy White is still looking for a job. But he’s still talking about his last job, and that probably won’t help him land his next job.
Appearing on WZGC-FM in Atlanta’s Dukes & Bell and given a chance to tell his side (again) as to what happened with the Falcons, White opted not to say something like, “I’m looking forward not backward.” He opted to look backward, and he suggested that the coaching staff wasn’t honest with him about its expectations for him in 2015.
“I just feel like coming into the season they had a role for me and it wasn’t told [to] me before the season started,” White said. “And I’m completely fine if somebody sits me down and tells me, ‘This is what we want you to do.’ . . . But when I’m meeting with the head coach and it’s right before training camp and we already went through OTAs and he was like trying to tell me that my role’s not going to be what it used to be but not fully saying what it is, then I didn’t really get where they were going with it. . . . So after that, I sat down and talked to [offensive coordinator] Kyle [Shanahan], whatever, whatever, thought things would change and things didn’t change.”
Later in the interview, White claimed that Shanahan told him that the Falcons would be the Golden State Warriors; White interpreted that to mean Julio Jones would be Steph Curry and White would be Klay Thompson, not Andrew Bogut.
White explained that, when things didn’t change, he opted not to complain because it wouldn’t have matters, and because things were going well.
“The reason why I didn’t fuss and argue and complain, because it wasn’t going to change anything,” White said. “Within the criteria of everything that was going on, especially the way that we started off, you know we started off hot, so there wasn’t no need for me to complain about anything at that point. But going through the season, as things progressed and things got worse . . . then when you go in and voice your opinion of some changes that you think should be made and they don’t get made, you just sit back and say, ‘Just let it come to fruition, just let whatever happens happen.’”
But that’s not entirely accurate. White’s first complaints came when the team was 4-0 and he said, “I’m not out here just f--king around just to sit around to just block f--king people all day. It’s not what I want to do.”
Not long after that, however, when trade chatter emerged, White declared that he will “be a Falcon for life.” He stopped being a Falcon in early March, and he was happy that it happened.
“And for me being released wasn’t a bad thing for me, because I wasn’t going to be on the team and have to accept that same role the following year again,” White said. “So then I would have self-destructed around there. I would have went crazy if I had to go through that another year. When I got released, it wasn’t like I wasn’t feeling like terrible because I was like, ‘I can’t play football like that,’ because I was just miserable. I knew that a lot of times that we had opportunities to win games and I wasn’t put in that position to make that play and I felt we lost those games because I wasn’t put in that position to make that plays. And I felt like if I was, we would have been in the playoffs.”
That’s a somewhat softer version of what White said in March, when he said that Shanahan “mismanaged things and screwed up” and failed to use “sound football.” White’s agent then claimed that Shanahan issued a me-or-Roddy ultimatum to the team.
Regardless, the message for any team that is interested in White is clear. Tell him how you plan to use him and stick to that plan, or risk a potential self-destruction.
That’s probably one of the reasons why no one has shown serious interest in White.