Kent Ninomiya - What is wrong with Philip Rivers? Here he is on the verge of achieving a life long goal of playing in the Superbowl and he's acting like a playground bully. Rivers was shown on national television trash talking Indianapolis Colt fans at the end of the AFC divisional game. The video was repeated over and over on ESPN for days. You would have thought Rivers would have learned his lesson the last time this happened. He was caught jawing to the Denver Broncos at the end of the regular-season finale. The Chargers are not the Raiders. They have always been seen as the clean cut good guys. Rivers is doing everything he can to change that image. He is making the team look like a bunch of classless punks who need to be taught a lesson.
By all accounts teammates are embarrassed by Rivers. The team's biggest star LaDainian Tomlinson says "I think we're perceived as a trash-talking team, and I hate that. That's never been my style, to really trash talk. The only thing you can do about that to change is to just play the game and quit talking about different things. Eventually it will go away, but you have to win also. The problem is that if you trash talk and you lose, people say that, 'This team, all they can do is talk and they can't back it up.' I've heard that this year already."
Rivers is proving himself to be an immature jerk. The tragedy is he is surrounded by class professionals who are forced to work with him. Instead of the classy guys raising him up, Rivers is bringing them all down. The last thing the Chargers need is to give other teams more motivation to beat them. Rivers invites people to knock him on his ass. Let's hope he wises up and grows some humility and self esteem.
