Eagles linebacker Nate Gerry apologized Thursday night for using the ‘N’ word in tweets dating back to 2011 and 2012.

We knew this was going to happen because we’ve seen it a hundred times before. Some loser with nothing better to do combs through an athlete’s Twitter history looking for racist, sexist, or homophobic language, unearths it, and then the player apologizes, says they were an idiot teenager, and deletes the tweets. Then life goes on.

Wrote Gerry:

It’s all good. Everybody says and does stupid things as a teenager. The N words he used ended with a soft A and not a hard R, which sounds ridiculous, but people seem to draw a very clear distinction between the two forms of the word. Usually it’s just some white kid who likes hip hop using the word because they hear it in songs and don’t understand at that age why non-black Americans shouldn’t be using it. They don’t understand the history and severity of the word.

In Gerry’s defense, a couple of his black Nebraska teammates responded:


Those opinions mean more than anything coming from Eagles fans or local media. Gregory and Mitchell played with Gerry years ago, so they have a better understanding of who he really is, and would know whether the N word was used with malice or just as a goofy white teenager thing.

Maybe the more interesting story here is the timing of this news. Nate Gerry is currently a target of fan ire because he hasn’t been playing very well this season. Jim Schwartz came out and defended him this week.

What happened here is that some disgruntled bozo with too much time on his hands decided to go through Gerry’s social media and look for some sort of damning language in an effort to get him cancelled and cut. Points for creativity, but this is some low-level, treacherous, scumbag fan behavior. It’s a treacherous and outrageous betrayal.

You might not like Nate Gerry the linebacker, but to pull this kind of stunt is out of line. We as Eagles fans are better than this.