ESPN’s Tony Gossi is telling his side of the awkward exchange with Shedeur Sanders after Friday night’s Brown-Panthers preseason game.
Gossi was confronted by the Browns’ rookie quarterback after the latter impressed during his debut with Cleveland.
“Tony, I be hoping you have something positive to say about me,” Sanders told Grossi in a video posted to Deion Sanders Jr.’s YouTube account. “You only say negative stuff about me. And I’m like, ‘I ain’t do nothing to you.’”
“I ain’t hear nothing positive you’ve ever said,” Sanders said with a smile.
“What I do to you, Tony?” Sanders said with a laugh as he walked away.
On Monday, the reporter addressed the situation on his self-titled “The Daily Grossi” show on ESPN Cleveland, saying that he was surprised by Sanders’ comments, although the conversation was “good-natured.”
“One thing to note was that I initiated the conversation,” Grossi said, via Awful Announcing. “He left the podium to walk to the locker room and I called his name to ask him another question. And that’s when he discussed what was on his mind. I was a little surprised he went into that because as I said, it was inaudible but I said, ‘Hey, this is your night man. This is a big night for you, have fun.’ But I appreciated the fact that he did not say what was on his mind from the podium, which other quarterbacks have done with me, which is very uncomfortable.”
The YouTube video of the back-and-forth being posted by Sanders’ half-brother also took Rossi by surprise.
“I didn’t appreciate the fact that this interaction was filmed without my knowledge,” Grossi said. “It turns out, it was his brother, who is documenting everything from his rookie season. That’s fine, just now that I’m aware of it, I’ll be a little more careful and everything. But everybody that saw the video, it was good-natured. I don’t know what caused us to laugh, I really can’t recall that conversation precisely. But we went on good terms.
“We had a couple [of] other words in the locker room, too. But I was a little surprised that, on his big night, and it was a big night for him with all of the circumstances, that he would raise this. That’s why I thought he was joking. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal on his mind after his big night. Anyways, all is good. We saw each other today at practice, and we move on.”
The exchange came just minutes after Sanders’ press conference following a 138 passing yard, two-touchdown performance in a 30-10 win over the Panthers.
After the game, Grossi offered the first-year signal-caller the praise he asked for.
“I thought Shedeur was outstanding,” he said during an appearance on ESPN Cleveland afterwards.
He later wrote: “My bottom line on Shedeur Sanders’ impressive debut: He put the pressure on QB2 Kenny Pickett and QB3 Dillon Gabriel to get healthy and perform next week.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
