Steve Young wasn’t happy about Jalen Ramsey demanding a trade out of Jacksonville. On ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown, he bemoaned the idea of the NFL becoming like the NBA with player empowerment and mobility, and urged front offices to stop capitulating to the demands of their stars.
We saw this in a sense with Tim Tebow last week that you can get a lot of mileage as a pundit going with a pro-institutions take in an environment when a lot of people on television have gravitated toward empathizing with players. It’s tricky because you get like 45 seconds — 90 tops — to make your point before it’s someone else’s turn to talk, so you better make it emphatically.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting Young wrote in his own book about a time where he killed a trade from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the St. Louis Cardinals:
I get a call from [Bucs coach] Ray Perkins. He said, “Congratulations, you’re a St. Louis Cardinal.” I called [agent Leigh Steinberg]. He told me the Cardinals had offered the Buccaneers their first-round pick for me. That meant Tampa would have the first and second picks overall. Perkins had his eye on Alabama’s All-American linebacker, Cornelius Bennett. I told Lee there was no way I was going to St. Louis. The Cardinals were another team that was going nowhere.
But I didn’t sit back and wait. I immediately called [Bucs owner] Hugh Culverhouse. I didn’t even give him a chance to say hello. “You traded me to the Cardinals? You tell me I’m your quarterback for life and you send me to the Cardinals? You can’t do that to me!”
