Patrick Crayton and Brandon Jacobs, as Will Ferrell's Harry Caray once said of his relationship to Mother Theresa, "are like oil and water." They just don't mix.
I usually get the feeling that sports rivalries heavy on sound bytes are half-real, half-manufactured attempts at drumming up personal interest or firing up a locker room, and not much else. Particularly in football, considering that Crayton and Jacobs are both offensive players, and will not get a chance to crash into each other in pure disdain, until one is made to play both sides of the ball.
But one gets the feeling that they kind of hate each other. At least a little.
Crayton is probably the answer to Jacobs, in that he is his team's resident smack-talker. But outside of that, they don't see eye to eye on much. Via Tim MacMahon at the Dallas Morning News Cowboys Blog, Albert Breer of The Sporting News assembled a top notch timeline of recent wars of words between the two teams, and the two aforementioned players seem to be at the center of it all.
In November of 2007, Crayton said, "We love playing on the road. One, because you love coming into another man's home. It's kinda like an invasion. We're kinda like big dogs, with what we're trying to do. We're trying to come in, urinate a little bit, and mark our territory."
Jacobs, always creative, responded by saying that Crayton "sucks."
Speaking about Terrell Owens in 2008, Crayton said, “Just because of his explosiveness and what he brings, he’s always a threat to run by you. Ask Sam Madison." Madison, of course, played cornerback for the Giants at the time. Crayton continued on his old friend Jacobs, "He’s been talking ever since (the opener). He even talked after the first game, I think it was on a Wednesday, he was like, ‘I wish they were flying in today, I’d go wait at the airport.’ Just little stuff like that – We showed up and you weren’t there. And when we got to Giants Stadium, he still wasn’t there. I don’t where he was at. We didn’t go to the terminal."
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The most cutting remark in the exchange, probably, came from Jacobs after Dallas' first round loss to New York in January of 2008. "They might have had a chance to win if Patrick Crayton didn't drop the two key passes," he said. "It was so sweet to see him drop those passes, which would have given them some momentum. But he dropped them, and they lost the game."
No word as of yet if Crayton will be waiting at DFW when the Giants' plane lands. Regardless, this could get entertaining.
