Deonte Thompson didn’t make a whole lot of headlines on the football field last season, but he’s certainly made his fair share — unintentional as they may be — during the first two weeks of spring practice.
The third-year wideout was asked how having John Brantley at quarterback was better for receivers than Tim Tebow (which he is) and Thompson dropped this quote.
“You never know with Tim,” Thompson said. “You can bolt, you think he’s running but he’ll come up and pass it to you. You just have to be ready at all times. With Brantley, everything’s with rhythm, time. You know what I mean, a real quarterback.”
Thompson let out one of the team’s dirtiest little secrets: Tim Tebow won a lot of games and is beloved by The Gator Nation, but some players are happy to see a few more touches with Tebow gone.
I’ve heard from multiple players that the team was excited for Brantley to play quarterback so that the Gators could throw the ball around a little more.
Does this mean Tebow didn’t give them a better shot to win? No.
Does it mean Thompson thinks Tebow is worse than Brantley? Not necessarily.
What it does mean is that Thompson (and I’m positive he’s not alone) knows he will get more chances to make plays with Brantley than with Tebow, and shame on him, he’s happy about it.
It’s not right for members of the media to act like Thompson was going after Tebow just for the sake of going after Tebow, but it’s not right for Urban Meyer to act like Thompson said nothing controversial.
It’s that mix of polar-opposite attitudes that came to a head after Wednesday’s practice.
The football team’s media spokesman Steve McClain huddled every member of the media in attendance while practice was going on and told us that no players or coaches would be made available for interviews after practice because of the way Thompson’s quotes were blown up in the national media.
None of us were happy about that, but pretty much everyone understood why.
McClain said that it was not the local media’s fault that it happened, but obviously Meyer felt otherwise.
After practice was over, he got in the face of the Orlando Sentinel beat reporter, who suggested strongly that Thompson was taking a shot at Tebow, and more or less threatened him in front of 20 or so other media members.
“You’ll be out of practice, you understand that?” Meyer said. “If you do that again. I told you five years ago: Don’t mess with our players. Don’t do it. You did it. You do it one more time and the Orlando Sentinel’s not welcome here ever again. Is that clear? It’s yes or no.”
He went on to say: “If that was my son, we’d be going at it right now.”
Many will question why Meyer took such a public forum to voice his displeasure with one individual, ensuring that this story would continue to grow for at least another few days. I certainly wouldn’t have written this column if not for what happened Wednesday.
In fact, had the team just let the media talk to players and coaches as scheduled, I’m sure no one would’ve written another word on this story.
By cutting off access, the team seemed to be sending a message that it wantsstories like this to die, but Meyer’s outburst did nothing but give it a longer shelf life.
Did he lose his cool? Was he just defending his player? Was he trying to make a statement to his team that the media is the enemy?
I can’t know for sure.
But if the goal was to make this story go away, Meyer did the exact opposite.
