We’ve always enjoyed the fiery personality of Green Bay Packers defensive end Mike Daniels.
It’s nice to see that someone appears like they actually give a shit. So when Daniels blew up in the locker room following the team’s loss to the Indianapolis Colts, we thought it was great.
Unfortunately, it appears a lot of the guys on the team didn’t. In fact, according to the Press-Gazette, most of the team has tuned Daniels out. Here’s a sample of what players had to say about the incident.
These came from players who wanted to remain anonymous.
“For me, after a loss, yelling is not going to do anything at that point, you know what I mean?” said one player. “That’s not the right time to do it. Of course everybody is pissed off that we just lost. If somebody is going to yell, it needs to be the coach. The coach needs to yell. Mike Daniels is going to do what he wants, though. It used to bother me but now I just close my ears to it.”
“He’s going to do it whether you want him to or not. That’s just the way he is.”
“He’s just a different character, man. He’s just different. One thing he does is he goes out there and plays his ass off, so you can’t really say nothing to him about that. (The yelling) is just something you’ve got to deal with. You don’t have to listen to it. He’s going to say what he wants to say though.”
Then here are guys who actually let them use their names.
“You don’t really need that,” safety Morgan Burnett said. “These are grown men with families. Man, there’s a respect level. You can get your point across without having to get in a guy’s face. You can get your point across many different ways.”
“A lot of people in here have kids and families, so you’re not just going to yell at nobody. You’ve got to kind of take a different approach with that. I think that’s the biggest thing from being in college to being in the league,” safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix said.
So what’s the leadership solution here?
What we were able to take away from this is that Packers do need vocal leadership, but not in the yelling at guys after the game kind of way. More in the respected veteran who chooses to pick his spots kind of way.
Charles Woodson has always been the template for that. It was noted by at least one player that Josh Sitton, who the team released just prior to the season, was another guy who provided that type of leadership.
Unfortunately, it appears the Packers no longer have that type of leader on the team.