Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman said he regrets his “immature” post-game rant only because it took attention off of the stellar game–and season–of his fellow teammates.
“Well, there isn’t much about that I regret. You know, mostly I regret I guess the storm afterwards, you know, the way it was covered, the way it was perceived and the attention that it took away from the fantastic performances from my teammates, you know,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Rachel Nichols. “You know, I don’t mean to attack him and that was immature and I probably shouldn’t have done that. I regret doing that but I just felt like my teammates are better and, you know, I have to apologize to them and I have.”
Sherman said he and Crabtree have been feuding and implied there was more to the feud that Sherman could not reveal in a “clean” way on national television.
He also said that “on the field, we’re playing a very barbaric sport. You can do as you please. And that’s when I take all of my animosity and all my anger and all my frustrations on the field.”
“With discipline football, sound football, you know, it takes a different kind of person to be able to turn that switch on and off and be able to step into the ring or step on the field and beat the intense incredible focus and kind of, you know, I guess angry human being that you have to be to be successful in those atmosphere,” he said. “You have to have that switch. You take it off. You treat it totally different. And that’s why sometimes it crashes and doesn’t go all so well because if you catch me in a moment on the field when I’m still in that zone, when I’m still as competitive as I can be and I’m trying to be in a place where I have to be to do everything I can to be successful on the football field and help my team win.”
Sherman said that he has to do “everything I need to be a winner” on the field, but he emphasized that he is a model citizen off the field and said it was “mind-boggling” that people reacted to his rant with racial slurs “and it was kind of sad that the way the world reacted, you know, I can’t say the word, I don’t want to generalize people like that because there are a lot of great people who didn’t react that way.”
“But for the people who did react that way until the racial slurs and things like that out there. It was really sad especially that close to Martin Luther King Day,” he said. “I’m not out there beating on people or committing crimes, or getting arrested or doing anything. I’m playing a football game at a high level and I got excited but what I did was within the lines of a football field. What they did was an actual reality. They showed their true character.
‘That was — those were real comments. Not in a moment. Not in a, you know, they had time to think about it. They were sitting at a computer and they expressed themselves in a true way and I thought society have to move past that.”
Sherman had already apologized to his teammates on Monday.
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