Florio rips Cowherd for saying ‘Tyrod and Cam are the same’

Seldom do sports talk show hosts criticize each other.  That would entail taking the competition seriously, which they don’t want to do.  But Mike Florio of NBC’s Pro Football Talk has issues with Colin Cowherd of FoxSports1’s The Herd.

Cowherd drew fire from Florio as well as from the twitterverse when he reported that the Los Angeles Chargers were leaning toward Tyrod Taylor as their quarterback over a pricey free agent, Cam Newton. 

Cowherd tweeted that “Cam and Tyrod are the same guy.  The gap between the 2 is tiny, and if coachability and health matters, I would say Tyrod Taylor gets the edge.  Since the end of his MVP season, Cam Newton is not as good as Tyrod Taylor.”

Chargers coach Anthony Lynn then went public with echoes of Cowherd’s analysis: “I would say right now Tyrod is in the driver’s seat.  If Cam is healthy he will be a good quarterback for somebody.”

The inference is somebody else.

But Lynn added a postscript that sounds like a walkback: “We’re looking at everybody.  I want to turn over every single rock.”

Florio interpreted the story as Lynn standing by his stand-in quarterback, with his very proper endorsement that was dutifully trumpeted by Cowherd, who was once  the voice of the baseball team in San Diego, where the Chargers played for half a century. Cowherd now lives in Los Angeles, where the Chargers now play.

“Colin Cowherd has ties to the Chargers’ organization,” Florio said, “was in their draft room two years ago.  When he comes out with the ridiculous assertion that Cam Newton and Tyrod Taylor are the same guy, it feels like he’s carrying water for the Chargers.”

What probably happened is that Cowherd called Chargers general manager Tom Telesco to see how interested the team was in Tom Brady, who was moving on from New England and considering the Chargers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Florio was unwilling to give Cowherd credit for investigative reporting, saying “the Chargers handed him the scoop that the Bucs would get the services of Tom Brady, not the Chargers.”

Florio noted that “when he was on the air later that day, he pushed only on the question of whether he got the Tom Brady scoop from the Chargers.  He didn’t address anything else.”

Indeed, Cowherd did not quote Telesco or Lynn on Taylor vs. Newton.  He offered opinions as being his own, but clearly they served the Chargers’ interest.  

The team wanted to devalue Newton on the free-agent market, without insulting a player they know has a much higher ceiling – specifically, Super Bowl — than Tyrod Taylor has.  Lynn is a run-first coach who surely would accommodate Newton’s unique duality.

Cowherd drew up a sheet of statistics that show Taylor outproducing Newton over the past four seasons.  The commentator did not point out that Newton missed 14 games during those years and was less than full speed for most of the others.

Cowherd, who behaves graciously most of the time, did not return fire on Florio.  All he said was, “Nobody gets information unless somebody wants to put it out there.”

My problem with Cowherd is that he relayed the info without questioning its veracity.  He’s right about Newton not being especially accurate and having shaky mechanics and – most of all – fragility due to his recklessness.  But Cowherd barely mentions Newton’s running ability, his speed, power and red-zone effectiveness and his deep-ball impact.

Lynn touched on doubts that prevail in the NFL: The MVP of 2015 is not as physically strong and fast at age 30 as he used to be.  The Chargers don’t want to pay the price for an MVP but would like to sign Newton at a discount. Perhaps he’s regained enough of himself to put them in the Super Bowl, where they haven’t been in 25 years.

Cowherd’s comparison of Taylor to Newton is, as Florio suggests, absurd.  Taylor was a backup in Baltimore and Cleveland and never threw more than 20 TDs in any of his 3 seasons in Buffalo, which eagerly ditched him for scatter-armed Josh Allen.

History shows Cowherd being woefully wrongheaded at times.  In 2007 he made insensitive comments about Sean Taylor, the Washington safety who was murdered in a break-in of his off-season home in Miami.  Cowherd asserted that Taylor had it coming because he once had friends in low, dark places and that “just because you clean the rug doesn’t mean you got everything out.”

The ensuing police investigation showed that the intruders did not know Taylor or any of his associates.  They did not intend to kill Taylor; they just wanted to rob him.

A couple of years ago, when Cowherd was hosting a talk show on ESPN, he argued that baseball is such a simple game that it’s easily mastered by players from the Dominican Republic.  The Caribbean island, he observed, is “not known for world-class academic abilities.”  

The network shut him down for that slur (even if there’s an element of truth: What is the Harvard of the Dominican?).  It didn’t matter much to Cowherd, who was already committed to moving to Fox, with a salary of $2 million per year.

It seems tacky for reporters to chastise one another, but sometimes one needs to keep another honest.  I think Mike Florio is right that Colin Cowherd was deceptive and disingenuous, as he pandered to the Chargers to promote their position and earn scoops in the future.