Don't Hate on Jerome Simpson or Bengals Fans will Hate on You

(Beast of the East on Bengals.com is the genius responsible for the photoshop above)

And the Jerome Simpson story has taken on a life of its own.

As such, I think I'll take a page out of Gregg Doyel's book and respond to some of the the postings that have showed up on Bengals.com and Go-Bengals.com. Actually, I won't respond, I'll just post them and let the hatred seep out, that will be way more fun.

Now lets get to the excitement.

There seemed to be three schools of thought on the Jerome Simpson piece:

1. People agreed with me

2. People didn't agree with me

3. Agree with me or not, everyone was unanimous in the fact that I came across as a smarmy, self-serving, waffle-eating ass hole who hates the Bengals. I'll go ahead and agree with three out of the four.

For the record, I did not post the Simpson piece on either message board, I posted it here on Its Never Sunny and on Bleacher Report. Then, like a Blood seeing a Crip at the supermarket, things escalated from there.

First up is kday777 from the Bengals.com message board.

kday777wrote:

John Breech is an idiot and anyone who agrees with his approach is equally an idiot. I hate guys like John, nothing but losers. People like that talk tough using the internet, would never in his life say anything to anyones face, unless of course he was drunk with a gang of friends, because we all know that that is the only way certain folks ever show any balls, drunk and with friends.

Guys who have never played football and will never ever play always talk the most ish about players, learn your role. Your role is to watch and cheer. Your role is to come on boards like this and pretend like you know a lot and talk ish to other people pretending like they know something and thinking what they say is important. Your role is not to confront players and talk ish when you would never say it to their faces. Learn your roles.

Next up, we have scharm from Go-bengals.com, he was very concise with his point:

I'm sorry John Breech you come off as a small dick loser. As for Jerome Simpson, Who cares?

Now here's a little something from USN Bengals on Go-Bengals.com:

What a self serving arrogant ass... just the fact that you feel you had the right to make fun of Jerome Simpson so you could have people pay attention to your sorry little ass is pathetic... then to post about it on another message board so you can get MORE attention possibly is even more indicative of what kind of little asinine fucking geek you are.

How about you just piss off?
Mmmmkay?
If you have such a need to have people pay attention to you so that you feel you might have a future in sitcom track laughter writing... go sing fucking karaoke in front of a mirror and heckle yourself.
Gnarly little fuckstick.

On a lighter note, we have Mcballerson:

[x] john_breech, i hope you get mauled by a bear.

[ ] john_breech, have a nice day free of bear-mauling.

Wait, here's some minor support from Essex Bengal on Go-Bengals.com:

So am I the only one who thinks this guy has a point? If you're ever going to get anywhere in the NFL, you're going to have to get used to people taking a cheap shot at you. We all hope (or at least I guess we do) that Jerome is going to get better and end up being a stud for the Bengals and having a great career. If that happens, along the way he's going to have to put up with this sort of stuff only a lot more of it. Imagine if Brett Favre took any notice of all the shit that's written about him. He probably wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Or what about all the shit that Chad gets thrown at him every day which is about 10,000 times worse than this?

This was just a 'throw away' comment which Simpson should have just ignored. He should just focus on improving his game and the only criticism he should be listening to is from his own coaching staff. John Breech writes stuff, Jerome Simpson plays football. If he lets something as minor as this get to him, he's never going to get anywhere in the game.

Lets get back to the insults, actually forget insults, barkerja on bengals.com is offering a $5,000 bet:

Well, let's see if Mr. Breech will put his money where his mouth is. I'm willing to throw down a $5,000 bet that Jerome will have 1,000 yards before Briscoe does.

Alright, lets end this with three explanations:

1. I tweet random gibberish 11 hours a day, three days a week. The infamous Briscoe-Simpson HOF tweet was meant tongue-in-cheek. Do I think Briscoe is a Hall-of-Famer, uh, no. Believe it or not, I do know a little bit about football.

On the other hand, I did not direct the tweet at Jerome Simpson's Twitter account (@Rome089). So when I say, I didn't give the tweet a second thought, I'm not kidding. Look at my twitter page, I tweeted about 50 more times that day. When I checked my email on Sunday morning and saw a message from Simpson, I actually had no clue what it was about. I had to go to my Twitter profile and look up everything I wrote Saturday before I figured it out. If I tweet that TJ Houshmandzadeh is a washed up pony-tailed girl that should have retired last year, I don't expect TJ to send me an email.

Think about this, Jerome has a lot on his plate, the last thing he needs to do is scour Twitter, Facebook or any other social network looking to talk trash to people that think he should have been cut. For the record, Jerome didn't tweet me, he sent me a private message on Twitter, which is even more ridiculous when you think about it. If other Bengals fans want to bash my opinion, I'm all for that, that's what message boards are for.

That being said, people who were saying it was a 'cheap insult,' or I was trying to 'instigate' something, the equivalent here would be if Rush Limbaugh got mad over a joke that Jon Stewart made. Stewart's show is supposed to be funny, but there is underlying truth to most of the things he says. Am I Jon Stewart? Hell no. But the tweet was written in the same manner.

2. The piece about Simpson was originally only published on this blog, it was blog material. If I could do things over, the only thing I would have done differently is not publish the piece on Bleacher Report. I would have kept it to Its Never Sunny in Cincinnati where it fits in with what the blog is about.

3. Finally and don't take this as me backtracking at all. But I'm a Bengals fan first, I want to see Simpson succeed. If he does well, then that helps the Bengals. Do I think he should have made the team? No, but that doesn't mean I can't cheer for him. As a Bengals fan, I don't have to agree with every move they make, but I'm sure as hell going to root for anyone wearing the uniform. And as long as Simpson is wearing it, I'll be rooting for him.

Oh and if anyone wants to call me a piece of shit to my face, you can do it on Twitter, Facebook or the comment section of this site.

By the way, I'll be at the Bengals-Falcons, Bengals-Panthers and Bengals-Chargers games this season, so kday77, I won't be hiding behind my computer, I'll be eating stale nachos and heckling the opposing team's fans.