DeAngelo Williams isn’t a large man, and he’s been carrying around this grudge for a long time.
So when someone finally asked the longtime Panthers running back about an old boss he didn’t like, he decided to unload it all at once.
Williams made it clear in an interview with WFAN that he wasn’t a fan of new Giants General Manager Dave Gettleman, the guy who cut him in Carolina after the 2014 season.
“He’s your problem now,” Williams said, via the New York Daily News. “That’s exactly what I’d tell them. For the vet players that are there now, be very cautious. Once he gets his guys in there, then he develops that relationship with them, and not developing a relationship with the guys that are already there because he doesn’t know them.”
Gettleman came to Charlotte with a mandate to clean up the books, and when Williams got on the wrong side of the age/value curve, he was gone. The situation with wide receiver Steve Smith (he was cut to relieve a mental burden from Cam Newton rather than a financial one), but it lacked a certain grace also.
“When you’re down in that locker room you are family . . . If I’m friends with you or I’m a family member of yours, when I call you into the office to release you, I handle it in a family member type way,” Williams said. “Like, ‘Hey, we really appreciate everything you’ve done for this organization, really loved everything you’re doing,’ it’s more like breaking up with your girlfriend, ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ Whatever excuses you give.
“When you come into an office somebody handling business, ‘Hey man, you’re gone.’ Like, wait, what? . . . Nine years. I been here for nine years, I played through injuries . . . I give everything you possibly can for an organization and the way they let you go is ‘Hey man, you’re out of here.’ They let Steve (Smith) go through a text message.”
Williams has been griping about this for years, and referred to Gettleman as a snake on Twitter, establishing a middle school level of discourse. Smith’s gone on to live his life, somehow.