Brian Mitchell gave his take on the Washington Football Team's embarrassing debacle stemming from quarterback Dwayne Haskins' incident following the loss to the Seahawks in Week 15 when he was photographed partying maskless and violating COVID protocols set forth by both the NFL as well as the team.
While the sports world has unloaded on Haskins' idiotic mistake, Mitchell, who chastised the former Ohio State quarterback for putting himself and his teammates at risk during a worldwide pandemic while in the midst of clinching the NFC East title this Sunday against the Panthers, had an interesting perspective on what could have prevented the situation all-together based on his experience during his NFL career.
“Listen, I came from Plaquemine, Louisiana to Washington, D.C.," Mitchell said on his show Tuesday. "I used to be a big fish in little bitty a** pond. I came up here, I was a damn minnow in a big a** ocean. And you know what? I was like wow, look at this, look at that. I was just ran over. But guess what happened? There were a bunch of veteran players on this football team, that would have kicked my a** if I tried to do something wrong, okay. They would say, ‘We’re going out tonight, you’re going with us,’ and they made sure I was taken care of. ‘You don’t need no more of them drinks.’"
Mitchell suggests that teams having more veterans in the locker room to hold players accountable could have prevented this debacle.
“This is how they handled it. But right now, in the NFL, I think a lot of teams need to hear this too: stop running off all the veteran players because they’ve gotten a little older, because that right veteran player may keep these type of things from happening,” Mitchell added.
Of the 53 players on the active roster as of Sunday, only Alex Smith, Thomas Davis, Ryan Kerrigan, Dontrelle Inman, and the specialists (Dustin Hopkins, Tress Way, and Nick Sundberg) are over the age of 30 and have spent years in the NFL.
Would the factor of teams having more veterans in the locker room provide the younger players with more mentors should they have questions or be seeking out advice?
Absolutely.