Like Manning, Clarett warned that he will sit out the season if he’s
taken by the Chargers, even though doing so could seriously damage his
career.
“I’m desperate to get into the NFL—as desperate as
anyone has ever been. But I’m not that desperate,” said
Clarett. “Sure, it’s my life dream to play in the NFL, but
I’ll live. There are plenty of other places to play, anyway. I
here that Manitoba is lovely during the winter months.”
Clarett’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, has held closed-door meetings with
the Chargers, warning them not to pick his client. The Chargers have
not indicated publicly whether they will heed Sexton’s warning,
but sources say that if Clarett is available, the team will probably
selected him.
GM AJ Smith says the Chargers are keeping all their options open, regardless
of Sexton’s and Clarett’s statements.
“We’ve heard the requests by Maurice and his agent, but
frankly, we’re going to draft who we want to draft,” said
GM AJ Smith. “Look- if we passed over every player that didn’t
want to play for us, we wouldn’t even have a team. Just look at
Philip Rivers. We had to talk him off a ledge after he found out he
was coming here.”
Still, the Clarett statement took many in the league by surprise. After
leaving Ohio State and announcing his intention to go pro, he was blocked
from entering the NFL draft by the Commissioner’s office. His
representatives then appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the
league’s ruling. With the supplemental draft as his only hope,
most experts believed Clarett would jump at the chance to play for any
team. But Clarett is holding firm to his position not to play for the
San Diego.
“Let me just reiterate my stance,” Clarett said on the Dan
Patrick radio show. “I love football more than life itself. I’d
give my right arm to play in the NFL. But I’m not a masochist.
I mean, did you see the Chargers play last year? It’s not that
they’re bad, it’s that they have no hope of getting any
better. If you had a lousy team, would you bring in Marty Schottenheimer
to right the ship? The guy took a decent team with a pretty good young
quarterback and turned them into the 1978 Buccaneers. I hate to be cruel,
but San Diego is the place football careers go to die.”
Schottenheimer has shrugged off Clarett’s criticisms. The veteran
coach insisted he still believes in his unique style of coaching, despite
the lack of success he’s had in his recent stints.
“I think my track record speaks for itself,” said Schottenheimer.“Well,
not the last few years. But the years I spent in Cleveland. They were
good, right? Anyway, I don’t understand why Clarett is so adamant
about not playing for us. My style is perfectly suited to him. I run
the ball constantly. I run the ball when we’re down by three touchdowns
in the fourth quarter. I don’t even care if we win or lose, as
long as we get to run the ball 30-40 times a day. Hmmm…I wonder
if it’s all the losing that’s turning people off to the
Chargers…Nah, it must be something else, like the perfect weather
and beautiful girls.”
Now that Clarett and Manning have taken a stand against playing for
San Diego, others are looking to follow suit. Some current Chargers
are said to be considering sitting out the 2004 season in an effort
to force a trade, and a Freshman quarterback from Iowa State has already
told the team not to select him in the 2007 draft.
“Since the Chargers will most likely have the number one pick
in the 2007 draft, I have to advise them not to pick me,” said
Kris Myers, the highly-touted gunslinger from Des Moines. “I don’t
even know if I’ll be a top ten pick by then, but I wanted to err
on the side of caution. Don’t pick me, AJ. Please, please don’t
pick me.”
Smith was taken aback by Myers statements, as well as the statements
of his current players. The outpouring of antipathy towards the franchise
has the Chargers brass searching for answers, but they haven’t
been easy to find.
“We had a couple scouts down in Iowa checking out that Myers kid,
but I guess we should cross him off the board,” said Smith. “We’ve
got bigger problems anyway. LaDanian Tomlinson just called and told
me he was going to sit out the season if he’s not traded. So did
Tim Dwight. At the rate we’re going, we won’t have any players
at all next year, except for Rivers. We have that guy right where we
want him—locked in the basement of Qualcomm Stadium.”
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