The biggest incident in the USFL’s debut weekend occurred off the field when a player was cut for a situation involving disrespect, chicken salad and pizza.
Former Pittsburgh Maulers running back De’Veon Smith was shown stunningly being released by head coach Kirby Wilson in the league’s “United By Football” documentary.
The incident quickly went viral, forcing the team to issue a statement on Monday that pointed the blame solely at Smith for multiple team violations.
“Much of the context was left out in this moment. Smith had violated three team rules in a 24-hour span, and in this particular incident, disrespected a cafeteria worker, which wasn’t captured on camera,” wrote the team.
But that drew quick retorts from Smith who blasted the team in a series of tweets for smearing his character.
“See now y’all playing with my character and who I am as a man.” tweeted Smith in one response.
After much back and forth, coach Wilson decided to address the incident in person at a press conference.
“The thing about this whole situation is I have a set of standards that we go by as a football team,” said Wilson. “Those standards weren’t met. That individual knew that we had a prior agreement that led to a later misunderstanding. Once those incidents were brought to my attention, I addressed them immediately.”
“These are life lessons. They have nothing to do with football. You’re trying to teach people how to respect other people, no matter how you see or view them. He had immediately reached back out, apologized, committed to trying to be a better man, a better person from the incident. But we had already moved on.
“It’s very unfortunate this went out as a one-sided story, but I’ve been in this business too long. We have a very, very high standard of football. It wasn’t met. When we have a player that steps out of line, with what we believe in as a staff, it must be dealt with. I didn’t think twice about it.”
Wilson also mentioned that he held those same standards for other players he coached like Emmitt Smith, Edgerrin James, Adrian Peterson and Curtis Martin.
While the Maulers have moved on and Smith is looking for a new team, some of the blame must be given to the USFL for releasing the original video without much context or explanation.
Unless that’s exactly what they wanted to do because they knew it would go viral.
