What a way to start the day.
Eagles safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson was spending his morning like many of us: scrolling Twitter after waking up, a bad but sometimes unavoidable habit, when he decided to respond to a video of now-former Eagles defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon explaining what happened to the team's defense in the second half of Super Bowl LVII:
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Well okay then!
Gardner-Johnson deleted the tweet shortly thereafter, and tweeted this four minutes later:
I did the same thing this morning. Respect.
It's kind of wild to see a pending free agent tweeting like this. Gardner-Johnson's rookie contract is up and he'll be free to sign wherever he wants when the league year begins on March 15. He obviously had a fantastic 2022 regular season and will be in high demand, including from the Eagles, who are reportedly going to make a strong push to keep him around. Wednesday morning's tweet will certainly endear him further to the portion of the Eagles fanbase who strongly dislikes Gannon.
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For what it's worth, Gannon's answer in that video... kind of put the majority of the blame on himself:
"They made a lot of good plays in that second half. We weren't able to get some stops when we needed to. I obviously could've done a better job of coaching a couple things that I want out of the calls. So, tough to swallow when you look back at it because it's such a big stage and we didn't get it done for the city, for Mr. Lurie, for Howie, and for the head coach. But learned a lot from it and you've got to give credit to Kansas City, but obviously I could've done a lot better job with what we were doing."
A lot of Eagles fans have some animosity towards Gannon for not talking after the Super Bowl, and then a little more for the way Gannon seemed annoyed Tuesday by repeated questions about the failures in that game. Those seem like fair reactions. It's funny, though, that Gardner-Johnson managed to quote tweet Gannon's single good answer.
We'll see what the future holds for the enigmatic safety. Great player, fiery personality. For selfish reasons like blogging, I certainly hope he sticks around.