The Broncos are set to host the Titans on the first Monday night of the 2020 season and that means they’ll have a chance to catch up with defensive tackle Jurrell Casey after trading him to Denver in March.
If there are any conversations with Titans brass, Casey might share some of the bad feelings that the trade created for him. Casey was a guest on the podcast hosted by Devin and Jason McCourty and he shared how it felt like “a blow to the heart” that the team didn’t tell him directly that they were looking to move him after a nine-year run.
A lot of those years were losing ones, but Casey re-signed with the Titans in 2017 and he wasn’t happy to get his walking papers coming off a deep playoff run.
“Those were some rough times. When you’re a loyal guy and you feel like things are going in the right direction and you’re that centerpiece, you got no choice but to fight it through,” Casey said, via Turron Davenport of ESPN.com. “My mindset was to stick it out and things would get better. For us to get to that point to get better and to be a main focus of that and then you just throw me away to the trash like I wasn’t a main block of that . . . Coming off an injury the year before and playing the whole season for ya’ll. No complaints, I did everything you wanted me to do and you throw me like a piece of trash. At the end of the day, none of these businesses are loyal.”
Casey is far from the first to point out that loyalty only goes so far in the NFL, especially when moving on saves the $11 million in cap space that the Titans created by dealing Casey to Denver this spring.