Doug Pederson, Malcolm Jenkins respond to Lane Johnson’s comments

Well, you didn’t expect to hear what you heard from Lane Johnson without there being a firestorm, did you? Malcolm Jenkins and Doug Pederson have offered their responses.

Does anyone else feel like they work for TMZ? The Philadelphia Eagles‘ up-and-down season continues, but rather than focus on games and solving the riddle that is the Buffalo Bills defense, everyone’s trying to uncover the identity of anonymous sources and figure out what Lane Johnson actually meant. Enter Eagles head coach Doug Pederson and the team’s star safety Malcolm Jenkins.

Yes, this stuff has gotten way out of control. We’ve all turned into FM DJs ladies and gentlemen.

For those of you who have been paying attention to something else or rewinding Nelson Agholor‘s lack of effort on another sure touchdown pass that was thrown in his direction, here’s what you missed.

Following whatever that was in Dallas, well Arlington if we’re being specific, NBC Sports Philly’s John Clark and Eagles legend and radio color analyst Mike Quick caught up with Johnson and this happened.

Wait. Call out sessions? Late to practice? late to meetings? Where did that come from? At first, it seemed like this was going to stir up more drama and thus was something that needed to be ignored, but then, every Philly mag weighed in and Coach got asked about it in a discussion with 94 WIP-FM’s Angelo Cataldi.

Pederson responded as you thought he might, with the ‘handle things internally’ rhetoric but did say that everyone does a good job of communicating when things like traffic become an issue. That’s totally fine. It should be an internal issue, and maybe we shouldn’t have heard about this from Johnson.

Everything that’s team related shouldn’t be out there for the public’s consumption anyway. Malcolm Jenkins was asked about the same issue recently during a talk he had with Jon Marks and Ike Reese during their show. Here’s some of what he said.

"I don’t really know where this narrative is coming from. I don’t know exactly who is being referenced when they talk about this stuff. So, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what Lane is talking about… (This doesn’t happen at) any of the meetings or practices that I’m apart of, and if that is happening, it’s not the responsibility of players."

If Pederson has lost control of this locker room, even slightly, he’ll need to reel things back in immediately. A loss versus the Dallas Cowboys can’t result in the loss of an entire season. The Eagles are only one game out of first place in the NFC East, and as mentioned, they’ve got a date with the Buffalo Bills on Sunday.