The Philadelphia Eagles traded Brandon Boykin to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Saturday, and the veteran cornerback reacted to being dealt in a similar fashion to LeSean McCoy.
While Boykin didn’t come right out and accuse Kelly of being racist, he did tell Derrick Gunn of Comcast SportsNet that Kelly is “uncomfortable around grown men of our culture.” Boykin elaborated in a text message.
“He can’t relate and that makes him uncomfortable,” Boykin wrote. “He likes total control of everything, and he don’t like to be uncomfortable. Players excel when you let them naturally be who they are, and in my experience that hasn’t been important to him, but you guys have heard this before me.”
Boykin later insisted that he was not implying that Kelly is racist.
“I’m not saying he’s a racist at all,” he said, per Judy Battista of NFL.com. “When you are a player, you want to be able to relate to your coach outside of football. There were times, he just wouldn’t talk to people. You would walk down the hallway, he wouldn’t say anything to you.”
It seems fairly obvious that Boykin saying reporters have “heard this before me” was in reference to McCoy saying Kelly is on a mission to get rid of all the good black players on the Eagles roster. In McCoy’s case, we only need to look at these comments from Kelly in 2008 to understand why the running back was shipped out of town.
Boykin, a former fourth-round pick, led the Eagles with six interceptions in 2013, but he picked off just one pass last season. He had fallen to third on the depth chart behind Bradley Fletcher and Cary Williams.
