Don't judge Jaire Alexander by his Griddy
We think we know professional athletes and can judge them based on those assumptions. But that's all they are, and we have to be careful jumping to conclusions.
Fans can trick themselves into believing they know the objects of their fandom more than they do. This parasocial relationship exists in all sorts of walks of life, not just sports. We have it with actors, singers, maybe podcasters, or newsletter writers. Even the people who get a chance to talk with pro athletes, the people on the beat who get to see them and interact with them every day, can trick themselves into believing they know these athletes.
But the latest turn in the Jaire Alexander saga serves as a pertinent reminder human beings are complicated and one little glimpse does not represent the whole.
We see No. 23 on the field playing with metric tons of swagger, a 5-foot-10 cornerback playing like he’s a foot taller, taking on blocks on receiver screens like a linebacker. He’s wearing sunglasses in press conferences and doing the Griddy after an incompletion just to mock Justin Jefferson.
Maybe we watch enough, listen to enough interviews, and like enough Instagram posts to believe we know Ja. We even call him “Ja” because we’ve heard Green Bay Packers head coach Matt LaFleur do it.
But how much do you really know about Jaire Alexander? He went to Lousiville, was a first-round pick of the Packers, has played his tail off ever since he got to Green Bay, and he’s an eccentric personality.
What else?
We still don’t know exactly what happened behind the scenes to get him suspended, that’s for sure. LaFleur spoke about the discussions they had. By his account, the two had multiple talks that LaFleur believes will make them stronger. Alexander, for his part, took responsibility for his role in the events that led to his suspension.
“There were definitely things that I could have improved upon to help with the communication and moving forward that won’t happen again,” Alexander said this week.
Watching a contrite, vulnerable, genuine, subtle, and earnest reaction from Alexander made me take stock of my own biases. It could not have been a starker contrast from his last media availability when he delivered the now infamous “it’s only suiting” answers around naming himself captain.
Remember, the coin-toss fiasco started because LaFleur didn’t know or didn’t care that Alexander was from Charlotte, the location where the Packers and Carolina Panthers played two weeks ago. Judging from context, the All-Pro cornerback felt like he deserved to be a captain, but his head coach didn’t care to put him out there. LaFleur insists that’s not how it works, that captains aren’t picked by how good the players are, and added he couldn’t name a player captain he wasn’t sure would play. Remember too that Alexander returned from a six-week injury absence for that Panthers game.
These sound like crucial conversations to have with his All-Pro cornerback.
But Ja Money -- I can call him that, right? -- is a gregarious, outgoing person. Surely, he would go talk to the coach if he was feeling miffed. Except I have no idea if any of those things are true. Not really.
Because I don’t know Jaire Alexander. And neither do you.
“It’s easy to talk to my guys, but ya know, talking to anybody else would be a little bit of a challenge,” Alexander said of his lack of communication.
In other words, he didn’t feel comfortable telling LaFleur he wanted to be a captain. Or maybe there just wasn’t a good time to have those conversations given the busy schedules of NFL coaches. Maybe he felt like LaFleur should just know, or maybe Alexander is like so many people who are self-assured and outgoing in specific scenarios where they feel most comfortable -- a defensive-backs room or between the white lines -- but when it comes to confronting a coach about personal feelings, he isn’t sure about the right words to say.
We don’t know. And they haven’t told us.
We have to remember for as close as we may feel to these players, watching their biggest professional moments, and following their careers while living and dying on their every play, these are also people with the same sorts of anxieties and fears, social hangups, and peccadillos that each of us faces in our own lives.
He’s not only the Jaire Alexander we see when we watch on TV every Sunday. He, like all of us, contains multitudes.
That goes for LaFleur too. Lost in the discussions about Alexander’s future are reasonable concerns about why a superstar cornerback wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to his young, congenial head coach. There are myriad potential explanations for this, which could be precisely why LaFleur and Alexander each stated how beneficial these discussions were.
It’s easy to imagine a situation where a player didn’t feel like he could express himself to his coach just as easily as one in which the player didn’t feel confident enough he could be vulnerable enough to tell his coach. Or that he believes his approach would fall on deaf ears.
Each of these situations presents very human problems, NFL stakes and pressure aside. It’s up to them to communicate, not on a corporate or franchise level but on a human level, and come to an understanding about supporting each other.
LaFleur can say all the right things about wanting to have a player-led locker room, but if his All-Pro cornerback isn’t buying that line for whatever reason -- let’s just say, for instance, the head coach insists on defending a defensive coordinator that seemingly everyone in the locker room and fan base thinks is incompetent -- that’s a problem that falls on him.
He knows Alexander much better than we do, it seems even he needed a bit more empathy and communication in this situation. That’s true even if there were other actions Alexander took that were destructive to team culture or whatever the explanation might be.
Again, we don’t know what happened. And speculating not only overplays our own knowledge of the situation but our knowledge of the people as well. The vitriol from fans toward Alexander -- or Packers left tackle David Bakhtiari for that matter because of his injury status or attitude or whatever the case may be -- stems from an unearned sense of obligation. Players are required to act a certain way for fans. There’s also this unearned sense of reciprocity, that because fans care so much about players players are obligated to act a certain way.
These parasocial relationships can trick us into believing we have a better handle on a situation than we do, and that goes for all of us, even and especially the take artists out there farming for clicks.
“It’s important to me, so that means I must understand it well.” That’s almost certainly not true, and given how little we know about the Alexander case, that’s more true than most other athlete stories.
We at least know what’s happened with Bakhtiari’s knee, his rehab, the setbacks, the fluid, etc. And even with more information, we don’t and usually can’t know some of the vital details, the personal side that always impacts these stores in meaningful ways.
Just knowing what Alexander the Green Bay Packer looks like on a football field or how he sounds in press conferences doesn’t mean we know Alexander the person. That leaves out crucial pieces of any puzzle, and rushing to judgment without having those pieces is unfair in the same way we can’t know exactly what went wrong on a play without having play calls and teaching points.
Alexander expects to play Sunday, wants to be on this team after this season, and believes his relationship with LaFleur and Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst will be stronger moving forward even if he admitted he might be having more “serious” media availabilities in the future.
I won’t speak for you, but I can tell you I don’t want less personality from Alexander. If anything, the whole point of this discussion is to say I want more. But I also want him to feel empowered to show those sides of him too if that’s what he wants.
It would be easy to erroneously judge a book by its white sunglasses. That’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.
Well said, Peter.
💯💯💯