One of FOX Sports' top personalities is taking issue with NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport for some of his Travis Kelce-related reporting this spring.
On Tuesday, "First Things First" host and Kansas City Chiefs superfan Nick Wright took Rapoport to task for his "widely misleading" post about the details of Kelce's contract — reporting that it's a three-year, $54.735 million deal with Year 1 being a $12 million salary with incentives, per the tight end's agents.
That led to Wright decrying how the information was handled and even going as far as saying RapSheet was deliberately misinforming with his coverage on yesterday's episode of his "What's Wright?" podcast.
The Washington Post/Getty Images
Nick Wright calls Ian Rapoport out for 'blatantly [misinforming] the public'
“I’ve had dinner with this guy. I share an agent with this guy. I have nothing against him personally. Much the opposite,” Wright began. “But Ian Rapoport’s tweet about Travis Kelce’s contract … this is now the second time in a couple weeks that Rapoport has, via his very popular and followed Twitter account, blatantly misinformed the public.”
“I’m not breaking this news. [Travis] signed a deal that is a one-year, $12 million deal that has $3 million in earnable incentives. That is the effective deal he signed,” the FTF voice explained.
“There is absolutely no shot, even if Travis decides, ‘I want to keep playing,’ that he is going to get a $40 million balloon payment in early March. Everyone knows that, which is why, if your goal is to inform the public, report the actual information," Wright argued.
“I’m not Edward R. Murrow, and I’m not even a journalist. But if you’re going to consider yourself a reporter and your job is to inform the public about news, then you cannot willingly put out intentionally wildly misleading information because you want the guy who runs Milk Honey Sport to owe you a favor,” he concluded. “... It’s not football fans’ job to really scour OverTheCap.com.”
Ian Rapoport community-noted for David Montgomery trade
One of the examples Wright cited was the Detroit Lions trade of running back David Montgomery to the Houston Texans earlier this month.
Rapoport was community-noted for claiming that a package of a fourth-round pick, a seventh-round pick and offensive lineman Juice Scruggs, was equivalent to “fifth-round value.”
While there's no doubt that the inner workings of NFL contracts and transactions can get complicated, some insiders' reporting can actually add to the confusion if they don't see past potential spin from the agencies and teams involved.
Ian is still one of the best in the business when it comes to breaking football news. But it can be a tough look when he and others' mistakes are called out to this degree.
