Basically every fan reaction to a player leaving your team in free agency falls into one of the following categories:
- HOW COULD YOU, YOU TRAITOROUS COWARD! I HOPE ALL THE BAD THINGS IN LIFE HAPPEN TO YOU AND NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU
- Well, we weren’t going to keep him anyway, glad he’ll get paid somewhere
- F that guy
- And then there’s those ones that sign somewhere else when it’s kind of like you and your friends picking different colleges, and it’s “I respect it, man, go make us proud”
Former Patriots starting cornerback and DeAndre Hopkins eraser Logan Ryan pretty much falls into category 4. After starting out with the team as a third round pick out of - wait for it - Rutgers, Ryan won a starting job over Alfonzo Dennard in a solid 2013 rookie season before spending 2014 buried behind Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner. After the great Patriots cornerback hysteria of the ‘15 offseason, Logan Ryan and that undrafted kid Malcolm Butler were a good-to-occasionally-great tag team at cornerback before Ryan signed a 3-year, $30,000,000 contract with the Titans in 2017. Of course, by then, Logan already had two Super Bowl rings, so obviously it was time to go make some real money (no offense to a third-round rookie contract).
But this is not about Logan Ryan’s career as a football player. This is about busting your buddy’s balls in good fun, which is precisely what Ryan did bright and early at 5am on Wednesday morning.
The target? Patriots safety and second-team All Pro special-teamer Nate Ebner, who apparently wears the same watch your dad probably does.
Woke up today wondering is @NateEbner still wearing them same dusty GShock watches everyday?? @McCourtyTwins @dharm32 @PatrickChung23
— Logan Ryan (@RealLoganRyan) May 16, 2018
For those of you who don’t know what that is, let’s put it this way, it’s a watch you’d probably only wear to the bar if there was a 90’s cover band playing.
Nate then shot back as only the best of bros can: with a burn of his own that’s equal parts BAMF and “That’s what I do, that’s my thing”
Junkyard dogs don’t change their collars #dustyAF
— Nate Ebner (@NateEbner) May 16, 2018
For you trivia nerds out there, this is a great burn on at least two levels: the obvious “up yours, buddy”, and Nate also worked as a kid at his family’s auto reclamation business, where he says him and his dad would “...basically would take the parts out of cars, but the main thing we did was buy broken-down cars, crush them and then take the crushed cars, stack them, then load semi-trucks with the crushed cars and sell the steel. That was my main job, crushing cars, loading semi-trucks. I loaded a semi-truck with 24 crushed cars at age 15 before I had my license. And the crusher didn’t have brakes on it.”
Meanwhile, Duron Harmon was quite amused.
Log be on
— Duron Harmon (@dharm32) May 16, 2018
Hey, if you can’t make fun of your friends, are they really even your friends?