Michael Vick on Riley Cooper-Cary Williams fight: ‘These young dudes don’t respect me’

When Riley Cooper and Cary Williams got into a fight at Philadelphia Eagles practice on Thursday, Michael Vick stepped in and tried to prevent the situation from escalating. As the video we posted earlier shows, Cooper walked away and looked like he wanted nothing to do with the scrum. Williams, however, seemed furious.

Cooper insisted that he and Williams had smoothed things over by the time practice ended, but Vick was not happy with his teammates.

“I try to be the peacemaker, but these young dudes don’t respect me,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News, motioning in the direction of Williams. “Our maturity level’s gotta be on a whole different plane. Regardless of who the catalyst was for the whole fight, that doesn’t matter. We’ve gotta be men. We’re not guys who are out on the street, fighting one another. We’re teammates … It’s game week. We don’t have time for that. I don’t. It’s a distraction.”

Vick was clearly upset over the fact that Williams was yelling in his face as he was trying to prevent him from going after Cooper. Despite his checkered past, Vick is the Eagles’ starting quarterback and one of the older guys on the team. He is expected to be a leader and that is exactly what he was trying to be.

DeSean Jackson, who also tried to play peacemaker, echoed Vick’s sentiment.

“You’re dealing with different personalities, different backgrounds,” Jackson said. “At the end of the day, we’re all here to do a job, first and foremost.”

While it’s fun to speculate about whether the fight had to do with Cooper’s racist outburst or not, Vick has a point. Fights are going to happen, but younger players on the team should respect the veteran guys when they step in to handle the situation. That is especially true when the start of the regular season is just days away.