Annie Apple Says Giants Leaned on Son Eli After Josh Brown Comments, Eli Denies It

Annie Apple, mother of Giants first round draft pick Eli Apple, has been a refreshing voice of honesty and humanity in the NFL ecosystem this season. Along with her Twitter account and various media appearances, she writes a weekly column. Last week, in light of the Giants' bungling of and cold-hearted obtuseness towards Josh Brown's domestic violence incident, she opened up about her past and being a victim of domestic violence. It was truly poignant.

Now comes the second stanza of this. As always in the NFL, nothing good or well-intentioned goes unpunished. The Giants played in London last week and Apple says that despite going there she couldn't bear to go into the stadium and watch the game. She is open about her distaste and disgust with the Giants organization at the moment.

You would think, perhaps optimistically, that even through their tin-eared way of handling the Brown fiasco, the Giants would understand why Apple feels the way she does—even without taking into account her personal history. But in her column this week, Apple writes this:

"I was livid with the Giants, not just because of John Mara's comments but I was disappointed in the organization because I felt they were leaning heavily on a 21-year-old kid in an effort to control what his mother says. That's not fair. Did I rob a liquor store in the middle of the night rocking a NY Giants Apple jersey? No. I merely shared my disappointment and sadness in the team's callous response to domestic violence because I am a survivor and it impacted me in a deep way. When Black Eli got drafted, everyone raved about what a great organization the Giants are. I was proud. I wanted my then 20-year-old son to go to a team that would help him grow not just his talents, but as a man and person. I believed the hype. I even drank the sugar-free blueberry Kool-Aid. By Friday in London, I was spitting it up."

Eli Apple, for his part, according to ProFootballTalk, told reporters Thursday that no one from the Giants had leaned on him or tried to get him to silence his mom, which is good. Though it's also the expected response from a rookie who doesn't have much organizational cache and probably wants to avoid (further) controversy.

Annie Apple also noted in her column Wednesday: " I have yet to hear from anyone from the Giants. Boy, what a great opportunity to show heart, but nope. It's business as usual. I'm not mad. I'm just enlightened."

This unwinding of events is sadly not surprising. The NFL, and its teams, despite their self-validation as anything else, should still be presumed to be self-interested and business-first at all times. But it also gets to the other issue about the NFL: every non-football occurrence or issue is seen through a narrow scope. It's either a distraction—whatever that obviously ambiguous word means—or it's not. If it is or can be then it's bad.

This lens also regularly points the blame on the principles involved that are not the teams. If Michael Sam is on a team, the question is if he will be a distraction, not that the NFL and their teams are so fundamentally shortsighted and flawed to not accept him and diminish those worries. About Apple, PFT's Mike Florio writes this:

"Annie Apple has every right to express herself, and the Giants deserve to be criticized for how they handled the Josh Brown situation. Still, it would be foolish to think other teams won't decide based on this case to include in future draft evaluations the possibility that a player will have a mother, father, or some other family member who develops a public voice that can be used to complicate the organization's desire to remove distractions and to focus single-mindedly on the challenge of winning football games."

After paying lip service to the atrocity of the crime, the argument again returns to the idea that a public-speaking family member could become a distraction because they dare criticize the team, ignoring that there would be no distraction without, say, an abusive spouse or a franchise ineptly dealing with it. Somehow putting the burden on a stray family member—even under the guise of oh, hey, teams will be thinking this—moves the conversation away from where it should be. This is, of course, what the NFL and their teams want, that someone else gets scrutinized for their mistakes.

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