Giants receiver Odell Beckham Jr. has opted to skip voluntary offseason workouts with the team. Arguably, he’s getting even better preparation for what he’ll be facing in the fall from Josh Norman and others.
As explained by Gary Myers of the New York Daily News, Beckham spent Thursday not at OTAs but working out with Hall of Famer Cris Carter, who is using tough love in an effort to help Beckham better deal with the verbal abuse he gets from opponents.
“I told him, ‘It’s the first time you’re the second best wide receiver in the building. I know you don’t like that, but get used to it. I’m the one with the [gold] jacket,” Carter told Myers. “His mind is in a great place. He knows what’s at stake. He wants to work out to get better. Sometimes a personal trainer is better than the strength coach for the team.”
Carter realizes that Beckham faces extra agitation because of who he is and how he has reacted in the past.
“With Odell, they go to extremes because it is him,” Carter said. “In 108 days, he will be ready to play against the Dallas Cowboys. Is he with the Giants at OTAs? I don’t care. It’s not my job. My job as a former player is to help young players understand about the business. I’m committed to helping Odell get better. So as far as OTAs, that’s somebody else’s responsibility.”
Still, with Beckham’s effort to work with people like Johnny Manziel (“Odell needed someone to throw him the ball,” Carter explained) and Carter coming one some of the same 10 days when the Giants have full-squad offseason practices aimed at preparing for the season, some are wondering whether he still doesn’t get it, whether he still hasn’t matured the way the team wants.
“Odell is going to grow up,” Carter said. “That why’s he is bringing other people in his life so he can grow up. If he wasn’t trying to grow up, he wouldn’t be calling Cris Carter. He’s getting people to tell him all the right stuff. He wants to be better. Not only as a player, but emotionally, as a son, friend and teammate. He’s in the process of doing that.”
Some would say Carter also has some growing up to do as a mentor, given that past stints have included a too-outlandish-to-be-true effort to advise incoming rookies to avoid criminal scrutiny by pre-arranging for a designated-driver-style “fall guy.”
“Being a mentor, that was one of the worst moments I’ve had,” Carter said. “You never want it to affect your ability to get access to young kids. I deeply regret the word choice. What I was trying to get across was these guys have crews. Stop driving the car. Stop having drugs in the car. Smart people realized what I was trying to say. The choice of words was bad and I would never, never give anyone advice about breaking the law.”
The “smart people” who realized what Carter was trying to say apparently didn’t include Carter himself, given that he seemed to realize what he said and what it meant when he profusely apologized for the remarks after they came to light.
“It’s really hard to go through my thought process,” Carter said in August 2015. “I can’t make an excuse for what my mindset was. My heart was in the right place. I didn’t use words that I was very proud of. It’s not the kind of advice I would offer young people. I would never tell young people to break the law or avoid prosecution. It was bad advice. I really, really regret my words when I heard them come back to me. And more importantly it hurt young people and it hurt them in their approach to the National Football League. So I take it very, very seriously. I do regret that day. I hope moving forward that the NFL still has enough trust in me and has me connected to their young people.”
Here are the comments that caused the kerfuffle: “If you all got a crew, you got to have a fall guy in the crew. If you all have a crew, one of those fools got to know, he’s the one going to jail. We’ll get him out.”
So while Carter likely won’t urge Beckham to get a “fall guy,” he’s also not urging Beckham to show up for OTAs.”
“I recommend he should do what he wants to do,” Carter said.
Beckham doing what he wants to do is one of the reasons he’s in a position where everyone watches what he chooses to do, because he’s done too many things that have caused problems for the team and for him. His latest choice -- to work out away from team property -- could become problematic more for him than the team, because a serious injury suffered while working out with Manziel or Carter or anyone else would jeopardize both Beckham’s $1.839 million salary for 2017 and his injury-guaranteed fifth-year option of $8.459 million.