Richard Sherman on suspended 49ers analyst’s comments on Lamar Jackson: ‘It wasn’t offensive’
49ers cornerback Richard Sherman says he wasn’t “as outraged as everybody else” over the comments made by the team’s radio analyst Tim Ryan this week about Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson that led to a one-game suspension from the team.
“I understand how it came be taken under a certain context and be offensive to some,” Sherman said. “But if you’re saying, ‘Hey, this is a brown ball, they’re wearing dark colors, and he has brown arms,’ honestly, we were having trouble seeing it on film. He’s making the play fake and sometimes he’s swinging his arm really fast. And you’re like, ‘Okay, does he have the ball on that play?’ And you look up and (Mark) Ingram’s running it.
“So it was technically a valid point, you can always phrase things better. You can always phrase things and not say, ‘his black skin,’ you know?”
Ryan was suspended by the 49ers on Wednesday for inappropriate comments made on KNBR radio in San Francisco Monday on the “Murph & Mac” morning show.
“He’s really good at that fake, Lamar Jackson, but when you consider his dark skin color with a dark football with a dark uniform, you could not see that thing,” said Ryan. “I mean you literally could not see when he was in and out of the mesh point and if you’re a half step slow on him in terms of your vision forget about it, he’s out of the gate.”
Ryan issued an apology through a team spokesperson: “I regret my choice of words in trying to describe the conditions of the game. Lamar Jackson is an MVP-caliber player and I respect him greatly. I want to sincerely apologize to him and anyone else I offended.”
Sherman said Ryan apologized to members of the 49ers at the team hotel while the club spends the week practicing in Bradenton, Fla. preparing for Sunday’s game against the New Orleans Saints.
Sherman noted that Ryan’s point was a good one and that it was difficult to decipher if Jackson, the leading MVP candidate who rushed for 101 yards against San Francisco last week, was handing the ball off or keeping it on zone-read runs.
“That’s why it wasn’t that offensive, because what he was saying is a great point,” said Sherman. “It’s been that way in any zone-read scheme. The mesh point is always a tough point of contention. So if you add a dark jersey to it, it’s going to make it even harder. But, obviously, you can always phrase it better. But I think it’s one of those things where he could have used better words but it may have been made bigger than what it really was.”
49ers play-by-play voice, Greg Papa, took to Ryan’s defense during his radio show on KNBR on Thursday.
“All I will say is that the comments were offensive because they offended people,” Papa said, according to the East Bay Times. “And they offended a great many people. In what we do for a living, word choice is critically important, and his word choice was not on point. He’s acknowledged that and he’s going to pay a stiff penalty for it.”
Ryan was suspended for one game and will be replaced by Dennis Brown, a former 49ers defensive lineman who has served as a television analyst previously.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 1:13 PM.
