There is a very fine line everyone is trying to walk here.
I don’t think there is any question that DeSean Jackson associates with individuals who are either currently or have been involved with gangs in the past.
DeSean Jackson isn’t a violent criminal, just a bad rapper. To my knowledge anything his friends may or may have not done in the past he wasn’t involved in. If the shoe was on the other foot and it was a white player who was friends with some childhood associates who also happened to be accused of being involved in shady activity would they have been cut?
We know DeSean wasn’t cut because of his production because he had career highs in everything last year. You could make a case that he was cut for his salary, but it wasn’t like the Eagles were in bad salary cap shape, so it had to be something else. Was this a knee jerk reaction to what happened with Aaron Hernandez?
I think the major difference is Hernandez is actually of accused of being the bad guy. Hernandez is being accused of being the triggerman in multiple shootings. Jackson like I said is just a bad rapper who probably took too many photos like this.
Only DeSean Jackson knows what is going on with the people he is hanging out. I think he likes that lifestyle and that crowd. That is his decision to make because he’s a grown man. I think you can be fair to Desean even if you disagree with some of the people he chooses to surround himself with. I am someone who believes if you produce then the other stuff as long as you aren’t committing crimes doesn’t matter. When DeSean had a poor season, I think you could rightly point to certain things off the field as a distraction, but last year that was not the case.
Rapper T.I. was on the Jim Rome show and gave his thoughts.
Recording artist and actor T.I. is disappointed in how the Philadelphia Eagles have handled the release of DeSean. The star of VH1’s “T.I. and Tiny: Family Hustle,” believes that insinuating the move had something to do with alleged gang ties, without actual proof, reflects badly on the league as a whole.
“I think it’s a poor display of social growth on behalf of the NFL,” T.I. told The Jim Rome Show.
The Grammy-winning artist hopes teams would refrain from making judgments about Jackson due to characteristics they may dislike, without something to back up those judgments.“I think that in this day and age to profile and to kind of stereotype someone because of the way they walk, or the way they talk, that’s profiling by definition,” said T.I. “Unless they have some sort of hardcore, concrete, true evidence of a law being broken, I don’t see what the big deal is, to be honest.”
Does the NFL stereotype? Absolutely, just look at how they are treating Johnny Manziel, but very rarely will you see someone as productive and young as DeSean Jackson cut just because a team doesn’t like his buddies or fear something bad may happen in the future.
Unless the Eagles know something, that we don’t know or haven’t known about DeSean Jackson for years, it looks very hypocritical of them to talk about how they want a certain image but re-sign Riley Cooper.
I am not blaming Riley Cooper for that, but the Eagles seem to be selective in their moral code.