Being a fan for an AFC East team that isn’t the New England Patriots is a bit of a chore. The Patriots have ran that division for two decades, and while the Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins, and New York Jets will occasionally turn into a thorn in their sides, the Tom Brady and Bill Belichick era has generally been unkind to those teams.
It could drive any fan crazy. It can also, apparently, drive Jets safety Jamal Adams to go all truck stick on New England’s mascot, Pat Patriot, at the Pro Bowl. In what was meant to be a fun moment of mascot trolling, Adams saw the mascot walk out onto the field while he was meeting with fans and decided to go tackle him.
https://twitter.com/TheAdamsEra/status/1088259286415958016
All in good fun, right? Well, apparently, when a 6-foot, 211 pound Pro Bowl safety tackles you, it, uh, hurts really bad. So much so that the person inside the costume has reportedly been hospitalized, much to the chagrin of the NFL. Michael DiRocco of ESPN spoke to Adams, who said he wasn’t trying to do anything malicious and didn’t tackle the mascot all that hard.
“He [the mascot] was running around and everybody was booing him, so I said, ‘You know what? Let me go tackle him,’” Adams said. “I didn’t hit him that hard, man. All jokes aside, I didn’t hit him that hard. I don’t know what’s really going on, but they did tell me he’s in the hospital. My intention was never to hurt him. it was all about just a joke but I definitely want to check on him and make sure everything is good. At the end of the day we were out here just having fun and it wasn’t nothing intentionally to try to hurt the guy.”
Of course, “didn’t hit him that hard” is more wishful thinking than anything when a professional football player tackles a person, but it’s still a rather unfortunate situation. There’s no word whether Adams will be disciplined by the league, the extent of the person’s injuries, and what the Patriots will do for their Super Bowl matchup with the Los Angeles Rams if the person who is usually their mascot can’t appear at the game.
