Giants’ wide receiver didn’t hold back during podcast appearance
Malik Nabers was frank with New York Giants GM Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll, telling them he would be “pretty hard on it” if he wasn’t getting the ball when he thought he should.
He proved it last season when he caught just four passes in a lopsided loss to the Philadelphia Eagles and reacted by saying “I was open.”
On the ‘7PM in Brooklyn With Carmelo Anthony’ podcast, Nabers was brutally honest about not getting the ball after putting in the work to do so:
“I’m not going to speak on all receivers. F—- it. I’m speaking on all receivers. We all feel the same way. We don’t like not getting the ball.
“These coaches … when you tell a receiver he is going to get about 7 catches in a game, we are calculating in our head. That’s about 100 yards. I need that to get my 1,000 yards. I need that to get in the Pro Bowl. I need that to get in the bracket so I can get paid.”
“You told me I was going to get the ball. I’m getting open and I’m not getting that pill. We’ve got a problem. Yeah, (receivers) definitely are divas. I ain’t playing about that ball.”
Maybe you consider worrying about his stats and his earnings power selfish. Maybe you don’t. That is up to you. What is absolutely true is that a playmaker like Nabers helps a team most when the ball is coming in his direction.
Nabers goes off on Shedeur Sanders’ fall
Nabers also had a lot to say about Shedeur Sanders falling to Round 5 in the NFL Draft, where he was finally selected No. 144 by the Cleveland Browns.
“You don’t do that to a person,” Nabers said. “You don’t do that to somebody like that.
“You can’t knock his talent. I heard a lot of things about — he takes unnecessary sacks. I mean, he had a bad O-line. He threw with a 70% [completion] percentage with a bad O-line. Talk about his escaping the pocket. You can pull up plenty of clips of him escaping three-to-four tackles [and] throwing it down the field. Damn near three of his receivers had 1,000 yards. Like, you can’t knock that.”
Nabers said he “lost a little bit of respect” for teams that passed on Sanders.
Nabers played catch on a Manhattan street with Sanders on Heisman Trophy weekend, saying “playing catch was just our way of telling the [Giants] organization [and] everybody around what we can do if we got together.”
The Giants, obviously were one of the teams that chose to go in a non-Sanders direction, trading up to No. 25 in the draft to select quarterback Jaxson Dart.