Jaguars defensive end Yannick Ngakoue has accused Bills left guard Richie Incognito of using racial slurs during Sunday’s playoff game. Incognito has been true to his surname since the allegations emerged.
A teammate, however, has vouched for Incognito. Left tackle Dion Dawkins, who like Ngakoue is African-American, took to Twitter to defend Incognito.
“Just for the world to know, everyone always tryna put some bad thing on [Incognito] i was next to my guy the entire game and the entire season and believe me, if he was saying some racist stuff I would have been the first to let him know that was out of line,” Dawkins said on Twitter. “Cut The BS.”
Dawkins may be unwittingly perpetrating some BS of his own, however. And plenty of people, despite Incognito’s history, are buying it.
While Dawkins would indeed be within earshot of Incognito before a given play commences, once the ball is snapped all hell breaks loose. Guys who were inches apart quickly are yards apart, and they are otherwise a bit too distracted to be listening to whatever a teammate may be saying in a scrum with another player in another area of the field.
I’m not going to create a laundry list of Incognito’s greatest hits, at least not for now. But those who would blindly accept Dawkins’ inherently flawed and necessarily incomplete observations about Incognito need to apply a little common sense to this one. Regardless of whether Incognito made racially inappropriate remarks in other games, Ngakoue has a name that is conducive to a racist bully deliberately mispronouncing it in order to simulate a slur.
And Incognito has proven via past behavior that he definitely would have the capacity to do something like that.