Ryan Fitzpatrick isn't backing down from his Bo Nix criticism, but there's one line he'd like to have back.
Fitzpatrick teed off on Nix during Prime Video's Thursday Night Football postgame show last week, calling the Broncos quarterback's play "almost disrespectful to the quarterback position" after Denver squeaked past the Seattle Seahawks 17-14 in overtime. On the latest episode of Fitz & Whit , the podcast he co-hosts with Prime Video colleague Andrew Whitworth, Fitzpatrick said he stands by the substance of what he said but regrets how he phrased it.
"The line about being disrespectful to the quarterback position, it boiled over, and that's the one phrase I wish I could have taken back, because I think my criticism was fair," Fitzpatrick said. "I don't think the effort and the competitiveness that he's shown in the past, I don't think he was showing that at the end of the game. That is somewhere I usually don't go, but that's what I felt."
Nix completed 17 of 27 passes for just 107 yards, averaging four yards per attempt, as Denver punted on six straight second-half drives before Sam Darnold threw a back-breaking interception in overtime that set up the Broncos' winning field goal. And while Denver's defense may have bailed Nix out, Fitzpatrick argued on Prime Video's postgame show that the result shouldn't obscure what he had watched.
"Bo Nix is not playing competitively," Fitzpatrick said then. "It's almost disrespectful to the quarterback position how he's playing football right now."
Anyone with eyes tended to agree with Fitzpatrick's assessment, and the former NFL quarterback received plenty of plaudits for speaking out so strongly against Nix's performance, even though the Broncos won. But former Broncos cornerback Aqib Talib wasn't among the people praising Fitzpatrick. In fact, Talib took it upon himself to discredit Fitzpatrick by pointing to Fitzpatrick's own NFL career, which spanned nine different franchises over 17 years.
Fitzpatrick answered Sunday morning in his characteristically disarming way, posting a video to social media in which he pretended he'd just gotten off the phone with Talib and resolved their differences. Rather than defend his résumé, he leaned into jokes about his own career, killing Talib with kindness and sidestepping the drawn-out media feud a more thin-skinned analyst might have welcomed.
Fitzpatrick is self-aware enough to know his nomadic 17-year career never came close to sniffing Canton, and he didn't need Talib to remind him. But plenty of analysts who never took an NFL snap can analyze football at a high level, and a quarterback who survived nine franchises is more than qualified to indict Nix's timid, listless performance, whatever his own résumé looked like. Just like he would've been equally justified in scrutinizing Darnold's two interceptions.
"I don't want to talk about Sam Darnold's two interceptions because, look, playing quarterback is hard, and there are a lot of things that you can't control," Fitzpatrick said. "But there are things you can control, and when you decide to turn it down, maybe that's what really bothered me."
And after watching Denver coast through Thursday's second half in four-minute mode, Fitzpatrick spent the weekend seeing quarterbacks across the league chase points deep into the fourth quarter.
"Something's going on with him. I don't know what it is," Fitzpatrick continued. "You watched CJ Stroud and Trevor Lawrence in that game at Wembley, going toe to toe, one after another. Even Aaron Rodgers and Jalon Daniels in the fourth quarter. You had Josh Allen and Kirk Cousins, and you had Jacoby Brissett, and you had Matthew Stafford just going at it. That's the type of competitiveness that the quarterback position deserves."
And until Nix shows that, Fitzpatrick has no reason to take back anything else he said.
The post Ryan Fitzpatrick walks back 'disrespectful' line about Bo Nix but stands by his criticism appeared first on Awful Announcing .
