Buffalo Bills: LeSean McCoy Has New Outlook After Chat With Goodell
By Paul Taylor
LeSean McCoy is aiming to be a better team leader this season for the Buffalo Bills, partly influenced by a lengthy conversation with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy has had an interesting couple of weekends, doing his bit for charity. Last Saturday he hosted a camp for underprivileged children, and this weekend his foundation is sponsoring the ALS Association Upstate New York Chapter’s Guinness Book of World Records Ice Bucket Challenge.
Regardless, it’s going to take more than supporting good causes to rid McCoy of the negative perception some people have of him, since he arrived in Buffalo. Whether it’s alluding to racism, planning ‘women only’ events, or just dealing with ongoing injury issues, he’s certainly been connected to more than his fair share of bad publicity.
Of course, this isn’t including the nightclub brawl from earlier this year. Yes, the four-time Pro Bowler was cleared of any wrongdoing, but he has to be careful about even putting himself in such situations in the first place.
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Fortunately, for both McCoy and the Bills, the Philadelphia incident appears to have been a wake up call for him. Now he wants to concentrate on being more a role model, in part helped by a conversation with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Speaking to The Buffalo News’ Vic Carucci and the rest of the media, the 28-year old said: “I had a long talk with Mr. Goodell about the incident.
“Just sitting back and viewing the whole situation, as a leader, the guy that I want to be for this team, things like that just can’t happen. I mean, there’s no excuses for it.”
McCoy considers himself to be a good person and in many ways he’s right, with his foundation and charity work. However, what resonated with him most from his chat to Goodell, was about how other leaders are perceived around the NFL.
McCoy said: “You don’t hear of other guys like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady getting in incidents like that. I think, sometimes, you get so lackadaisical with just being successful as a football player and then you let all the minor, small things go.
“With a situation like that, if you’ve got security or you’ve got even off-duty officers working for me at the time and this thing never even gets out of hand. So there’s always ways to kind of resolve and, hopefully, not even take it to that level where it’s a big situation where now it’s looked at doing something negative and wrong.”
One thing which should help the two-time First-team All-Pro become a better role model and team leader, is the support who received from Bills co-owner, Terry Pegula: “I didn’t know how to talk to Mrs. (Kim) Pegula about that, that was kind of tough, but he was real positive.
“He asked me what happened exactly, I told him, and that was really it. He’s been around, so he understands things do happen and I was happy he was understanding about it, but it was fine and I’m blessed to be in a situation like this where my owners are understanding.”
Of course, as good as this all sounds, McCoy knows talk is cheap. Ultimately, it’s his actions moving forward that will tell us if he has learned from everything that has happened in the last 14 months.
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Are you convinced that McCoy will be a better role model moving forward? Further, what sort of season are you predicting from him ON the field? Let us know in the comments section below.