New York Giants interim head coach Mike Kafka tried to brush off the scathing criticism from receiver Malik Nabers last week, in which the injured star receiver questioned some of the coaching decisions made in the Giants’ 34-27 overtime loss to the Detroit Lions before quickly deleting the tweet.
“Sometimes I think they b makin us lose on purpose. Cause it’s no way, bro, you throw the ball instead of running it to make 'em burn two timeouts??? Then you don't kick the field goal.??? Then they have to go down and score!!! Football common sense!!!! Am I missing something?” Nabers wrote.
Kafka said he didn’t see the tweet by Nabers, but added that he had no regrets about the calls he made in the game, particularly the decision to go for it on fourth down and not kick the field goal.
“I stand by it. I don't have any regrets about it,” Kafka said on Wednesday. “I thought we were aggressive to try to win the game.”
Kafka, for his part, said he didn’t have an issue with players expressing themselves.
“I think the beauty of the National Football League is the players can express themselves,” he said. “You can express yourself any way you want. The beauty of it is, and I think any player, they're going to go out there and they're going to have an opinion of what they'd like to see.
“But at the end of the day, those are the calls we're going to make on game day, and those are the calls we're going to make for the betterment of the team.”
He added that if a player were to cross the line with something detrimental to the team, that would be a different story.
“If it's detrimental to the team, we'll address it in-house and talk through it and move on.”
Nabers, Kafka confirmed, has been rehabbing from surgery to repair his season-ending ACL injury suffered in Week 4 in the team’s East Rutherford facility.
While Kafka didn't have much to say about Nabers's criticism, he did acknowledge the feedback from the President of the United States, who also questioned the wisdom in not kicking a field goal when inside the Lions' 5-yard line on fourth down.
"Everyone's going to have an opinion," he said. "I'm going to do the best I can for myself, for the team first, to give us an opportunity to win the game. And whatever that call, whoever it was, a player, a coach, my aunt and uncle, my dad--like I heard it from everybody. And that's okay. They can have their opinions, and I respect that.
"But I'm going to do what's best for the team, try to do what's best for the team. Whether it's winning the game on the last play of the game, being aggressive, going for two if we get an opportunity, whatever that situation is, that's where we got to thrive and that's where we got to turn the table in terms of our team is when it's nut cutting time."
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