Remember that Abdul Carter jersey number thing that we all made a big deal of last week? When he made a run at Lawrence Taylor's extremely retired #56, only to have Taylor respectfully tell him to, uh, find his own number? And then we all moved on with our lives?
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Well, Albert Breer didn't move on with his life. Albert Breer decided to drag us all back into last week because apparently the retired jersey number discourse was not completely finished until he had his say. In his latest roundup of random NFL thoughts loosely grouped together by any number of themes, Breer spent the very last words of his column talking about how players should approach picking jersey numbers – you know, the important stuff. If you can believe it, his take basically mirrors every other person's take.
Albert Breer weighed in on the Lawrence Taylor-Abdul Carter number thing for ... reasons?
"Next time a rookie asks for a retired number, I hope they do it quietly," Breer wrote. "To me, it puts a legendary player in an impossible position—he should be proud to have his number retired, reserve the right to say no and not be worried about being put on the spot over it."
Just because the first two paragraphs of this blog were probably a little too hard on Breer, I'll make up for it now by saying: I generally agree. Carter put Taylor in a bit of a tough spot – no matter who you are, it's kinda awkward to have to say no in that situation. Still, I blame the Giants way more than I blame either of the two players – they should have stepped in before this got nice and awkward. Instead, they let Taylor deal with publicly answering Carter, which doesn't necessarily feel like how you treat franchise legends.
Then again, this is coming from the team that let Saquon Barkley walk and immediately sign a big ol' contract with a division rival. Maybe none of us should be surprised that the Giants dropped the ball on this once again. Besides: #51 is close enough to #56 for everyone to get what Carter was going for. I think we can all close the book on this weirdly-awkward moment in time, which means that the Giants will probably do something weird to drag this out way longer; they still have four whole months to figure out how.