By Nick Shook
NFL.com
Read full post on NFL.com
Sunday’s fracas in Jacksonville resulted in the ejection of two players.
One still has something to say about the other.
After his pestering caused Bengals receiver A.J. Green to lose his cool and take him down to the ground by the neck, Jaguars cornerback Jalen Ramsey broke down his approach to trash talking on Wednesday. He wasn’t shy.
“I lock receivers down, physically. And then mentally I live in their mind,” Ramsey said. “Get under their skin. I talk my talk. Whatever I’m going to say — there’s rumors out there that I say some deep, some personal stuff. That’s not true.
“Yeah, I get out there, I do my thing. I talk s—. But I don’t go personal. I don’t talk about nobody’s wife or nobody’s kids or nobody’s family. I don’t do that. So that’s untrue, that’s not true at all. I think he even said that, though, there was nothing I said — I didn’t say nothing like that.”
So if the comments didn’t go personal, what did Ramsey say to make Green — typically one of the more relaxed, calm wideouts in the NFL — blow his top?
“I told him almost every play that he was weak, that he was soft,” Ramsey said. “Them is straight facts. He just couldn’t handle the truth. Those were facts. I told him that his time was almost up. I told him that it was easy, which it was. He had one catch for six yards.
“I was just out there spitting facts to him. And he got mad. And then people are trying to talk about the push, I mean I pushed him every single play. You can go back and look at the film, I pushed him every single play. I told him to stop putting his hand on me.”
Facts or not, what’s becoming factual is Ramsey’s growing reputation for being an eager player of head games. Some of sports’ best — Larry Bird, John Randle, Michael Jordan — have been excellent at this form of mental competition. Nothing wrong with gaining a little edge.
Now retired, Steve Smith once had a memorable and somewhat similar exchange with Ramsey in 2016, which ended with Smith telling Ramsey “I’ve got cleats with stronger thread than you!” The Ravens won their matchup last season, 19-17, meaning Smith got the last laugh. But as the Jaguarsorganization demonstrated with Tom Coughlin’s Tuesday statement, as long as Ramsey backs up his trash talk with his play, no one’s going to have a problem with it — except the man he’s covering.