Lions receiver Jameson Williams spent his 4th of July the way many of us did: enjoying some fireworks. Only Williams was the one lighting them, judging by the video he posted on Instagram early Wednesday morning. "I'm sorry," says Valenti, "we have to talk about it." Namely, Jamo's habit for inviting scrutiny on social media:
"No one is persecuting the young man. I don’t understand why there’s this weird bubblewrap around Jameson Williams where we can’t talk about him. By the time he comes back in the middle of this season, he will still have one catch to his name in a year and a half. And a lot of the dumb stuff he’s done, he's put on social media.
"So don’t get hyper-offended. Everybody wants the guy to be good. But when now a video surfaces at 1:30 in the morning of Jamo lighting fireworks, I’m sorry, we have to talk about it for this reason: You are a professional athlete. You are welcome to live your life however you want to live it. But when you put it on social media, now you’ve shown people the way you live it and what you’re doing. And to say that Jamo has been called into question a couple of times would be accurate; doing questionable things, also accurate. And this is another."
Among his perceived missteps on social media this offseason, Williams liked a Tweet suggesting the Lions should replace Jared Goff with Lamar Jackson and, in the days after he received a six-game suspension for gambling, shared a video of himself at a boxing match in Las Vegas. Another video made the rounds in March of Williams apparently at a Coney restaurant on Detroit's 6 Mile late into the night.
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And Valenti says that "if you're an NFL player in a prove-it stage in your career, I don’t care if you’re Jamo or Jared Goff or anybody in between, I don’t want to see my players, two weeks before camp, lighting fireworks. That’s full-stop. That’s not a Jamo thing."
"And before you hit me with America and freedom and 4th of July, I approach this with a bias. My own team had a borderline franchise player blow off a large portion of his right hand lighting fireworks: Jason Pierre-Paul. I don’t get why any adult is out there lighting hand cannons in the back yard. They’re dangerous, they’re stupid, it just doesn’t make any sense. But when you’re Jamo, if it’s stupid for a regular person to do it, it’s really stupid for you to do it. You make your living with your hands, man. Not as a hand model, as a wide receiver.
"This doesn’t make you a bad kid, but what I hate is when we just absolve it all and go, 'Just let him live his life.' Listen, there are clauses in NFL contracts that don’t allow you to do a lot of things the rest of us get to do."
Valenti says that Williams should follow the lead of teammate Amon-Ra St. Brown and just focus on football:
"Amon-Ra is one of my favorite Lions. Beyond the fact that he’s awesome, hard-nosed and got a chip on his shoulder, he’s all business. He just goes to work. There’s no need for social media, does his work in silence, The Jamo thing, all I’ve asked is, please, do yourself a favor, disappear. Get off the socials, go to work."
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