Jeremy Maclin clarified the situation around his release to Adam Schefter on his new podcast.
If you look at the stat sheet and nothing, you likely thought Jeremy Maclin had a down year last year and maybe began to age a bit early as he nears the 30-year-old mark. What the box scores don’t tell you is that the former Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver played through injuries last year, including a torn groin muscle that limited his productivity and even availability at times.
Maclin finished the season with 44 catches for 563 receiving yards and 2 touchdowns. All three were career-low totals in those respective categories, which likely led to his release from Kansas City considering he was going to require a $12 million cap hit. Speaking to Adam Schefter on his podcast Know Them From Adam, Maclin said the blame is partially on him for forgetting the NFL is business in that way.
“It is what it is. It’s a business. You can’t lose sight of that. Maybe I was at a place where I thought that the personal relationships would overshadow the business part of it a little bit, and maybe that’s partially my fault. You just can’t lose sight of the fact that it’s a business.”
Maclin has already said he was released via voice mail message, but he provided Schefter with more context around the move. If anything else, Maclin seems to wish that Dorsey would have simply tried him later to have a real conversation about it since neither side could do anything official until Monday anyway. In short, there was time to make a connection and talk it out.
“They left me a voice mail, John [Dorsey, general manager] did,” said Maclin. “I was en route to go down to Fletcher Cox’s football camp in Mississippi. I was on a flight, so clearly he couldn’t get to me, so he left me a voice mail. But the issue is that they released me so late on Friday that I wouldn’t become a free agent until Monday anyways, so I would at least think to have the respect for me enough to have a conversation with me, not really find out through a voice mail. I think that’s where, in my opinion, the problem is.”