Jerry Jeudy took questions at the Giants’ facility on Wednesday for the first time since the trade, three days into an 0–1 start, and spent most of nine minutes on a team in Ohio that had just won by twenty-eight. He was asked about his former head coach four separate times.
The Giants take their midweek availability in the auditorium rather than at the lockers, so Jeudy stood at a blue wall in practice shorts, still in his cleats. Nine reporters, two cameras, a phone on a stick held over somebody’s shoulder. He had done a short one the day he arrived, four minutes about being excited, and this was the first time anybody in New York had a reason to stand there longer than that. The club did not put a staffer next to him. Most of the nine minutes went to Cleveland, and everyone standing there knew that before he walked out.
Q.Two weeks in. How much of this offense do you have?
JEUDY: Most of it. It’s the same route concepts I’ve been running since Denver, they just call them something else here, so mostly it’s me not saying the wrong word in the huddle. The motions are what I’m behind on, when I’m the one setting it. I was in here Monday night with coach on the board until nine o’clock.
Q.Sunday. Your own afternoon — what did you think of it?
JEUDY: I had one I should have had. Third quarter, on the boundary, ball’s on me and I’m running before I caught it. That’s mine. I don’t need to watch it again to know what it was.
Other than that I ran all right. We didn’t score, so it doesn’t matter much what I thought of my routes.
Q.New locker room, and the first thing that happens is a loss. What’s a week like that?
JEUDY: It’s a Wednesday. We practiced.
Guys in here have been through worse than one game. Dart sends me clips at midnight, which I don’t be up for, but they’re there in the morning and I go through them at breakfast. That’s been the best thing about the two weeks, honestly. He wants it a certain way and he’ll tell you.
Q.Did you watch Cleveland on Sunday?
JEUDY: The end of it. It was on in the room when we came in off the field.
Q.Thirty-five to seven, on the road. They were getting nine and a half and they won by twenty-eight. What did you see?
JEUDY: They got good players.
That’s the answer. They had good players in June, when the projections had them at four wins, and they had good players in August when I was standing in there. Quinshon runs through people. He was doing that at Ohio State and he did it to our own defense in the spring. Harold is going to catch it inside the ten. That’s just what he is, he was that in his second week of camp. KC was the fastest man on the field Sunday and he was the fastest man on the field in May.
Put those three on any team in this league and they score points.
Q.And Jacksonville?
JEUDY: Jacksonville laid down.
One o’clock, first Sunday, hot as hell down there, coming off thirteen wins and a whole summer of being told what they are. I’ve been on teams like that. You can see it by the second series — guys jogging back to the huddle, real quiet over on their sideline. That’s a flat football team and it happens to somebody every September.
Q.So the score tells you nothing at all?
JEUDY: It tells me Judkins is good and Jacksonville had a bad day. What else is it supposed to tell me?
Q.A lot of people watched that game and gave the credit to the sideline.
JEUDY: To who, though?
(Two reporters laughed. He did not.)
I’m asking. Travis Switzer has been in this league longer than I have and that’s his third-down sheet, he had it Monday morning every week I was there. Christian Jones is the best position coach I’ve had, and I’ve had good ones. Mike Rutenberg’s defense gave up seven points in that heat, and Mike has been in these buildings twenty-some years. That’s the coaching staff. I’ll say that anywhere.
“I know what you asked me. That’s my answer.”
Asked why he keeps saying general managerQ.You just named three assistants. You haven’t said the head coach at all since you got up here.
JEUDY: I said the general manager. That’s his job, that department is his, he made the trade himself. He’s good at that and I’ve never said different, not once, not in August either.
Q.I didn’t ask you that.
JEUDY: I know what you asked me. That’s my answer.
(He waited. The reporter went to something else.)
Q.Would you take back anything you said in August?
JEUDY: No.
Q.None of it?
JEUDY: They won a football game. Good for them, I got friends in there, I was texting three of them Sunday night. It doesn’t move anything I said, because what I said wasn’t about a Sunday in September.
Y’all keep walking the score over to me like the score is the answer to it.
Q.What was it about, then?
JEUDY: January. It’s still January. I said all of that once, in Cleveland, in front of the people who cover it, and it’s on the internet for the rest of my life. I’m not standing up here doing it again in a different city.
What I’ll talk about is the football, since that’s what y’all came in here for.
That’s a grown locker room. Elgton Jenkins has been starting in this league ten years. Hopkins is going to Canton. Delpit has been in that building since he was twenty-two, through all of it. Them men go to Jacksonville and win a game, and I’m supposed to hand that to somebody who has never had a helmet on and has never stood on a sideline anywhere in his life? Nah.
Q.That’s a strong thing to say about a team that’s 1–0.
JEUDY: Them boys deserve better than what’s standing in front of them.
Q.Better than 1–0?
JEUDY: Better.
Q.You want to leave it there?
JEUDY: Yeah.
Q.Twenty-of-twenty-four from Shedeur Sanders, two touchdowns. You caught passes from him for a year.
JEUDY: I’m happy for him and I mean that.
He was throwing it like that in May with nothing in front of him. It just wasn’t on television. Twenty-four throws and he wasn’t late on one, and being on time like that is the hardest thing there is at that position — it’s harder than the arm, way harder. He asks you about your route on Monday and then he asks you the same thing Wednesday to see if you say it the same way. Not many twenty-four-year-olds are doing that.
He texted me back at one in the morning Sunday, so he was up.
Q.What did you say to him?
JEUDY: That’s for him, not for y’all. It wasn’t nothing deep, he knows what I think about him.
Q.Have you spoken to Cleveland at all since it happened?
JEUDY: He called me that day. I picked up.
It was four minutes and it was fine. He was straight with me about why, same as he’s always been straight with me, and I told him I’d see him around. There’s no problem between me and that man personally and there never was one.
Q.People read what you said in August as personal.
JEUDY: Personal is when I don’t like somebody. I like him fine.
Y’all heard me use one hard word in August and quit listening to everything after it. I’m telling you what I watched for eight months. If he was standing right here I’d say it the same way, and he knows I would, because I already did say it to him and he sat there and took it.
Q.They’re 1–0 and you’re 0–1. Does that get to you at all?
JEUDY: I’m not sitting in my house watching Cleveland highlights. We had that game Sunday and we gave it up, that’s what’s in my head this week.
Q.Is this going to be every Wednesday for you now?
JEUDY: That’s y’all’s business, not mine. Ask me about a football team I play for and I’ll be up here all day.
Q.All right — what do you need out of Sunday, personally?
JEUDY: Get open, catch it. They didn’t trade for me to do something different than what I do.
(He said he appreciated them and went back up the hallway. Nine minutes.)
The clip was up on three New York accounts before the reporters got to their cars, and by Wednesday night the version travelling fastest was eleven seconds long and had nothing in it about Jacksonville being flat. Cleveland radio took it on Thursday morning and took it hard; 92.3 played the whole exchange twice and then spent two segments on whether a man is allowed to say that about a 1–0 team, with callers on both ends of it and one who only wanted to argue about the third-rounder they got back.
The Browns gave it nothing. Grant Delpit, asked at his locker, said he had not seen it and then said Jerry was good to him for two years. KC Concepcion said he still had him in his phone. Mansour was asked twice Thursday and answered once: that Jeudy caught 50 balls in an offense that went three-and-out all last year, that the receiver room he left is better because of the two weeks he spent with the rookies in August, and that trading him was a decision he made and Jeudy did not.
The internet had a better time with it than either building did. The r/nfl thread went past four thousand comments by midnight and the top one was a screenshot of the words “general manager” with no caption at all.
The Giants practice Thursday and Friday and play Sunday. Jeudy took two more questions at his locker afterward, both about the offense, both under ten words, and the club has him scheduled again next Wednesday.
