Seahawks' Irvin details altercation with Saints' Graham

SEATTLE — New Orleans Saints tight end Jimmy Graham wasn’t in the mood to talk about his pregame altercation with Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bruce Irvin after Saturday’s season-ending divisional playoff loss.

But Irvin was more than happy to give the blow-by-blow.

“Jimmy was warming up in our area and I just asked, ‘Could you go on your side of the field?’” Irvin said after the Seahawks’ 23-15 win. “And he said, ‘I’m Jimmy.’ And I said, ‘Who is Jimmy? I don’t know Jimmy.’”

Photographers on the field caught Graham yelling and removing Irvin’s knit hat as a Saints staff member tried to hold him back. But Irvin said that came only after he escalated the exchange.

“Y’all missed the first part. I took his ball and booted it across the field,” Irvin said. “That’s when he knocked my hat off.”

Graham said only that Irvin “tried to disrespect me, and I’m not going to let anyone disrespect me. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Also before the game, Graham got into a shouting match with Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who played a role in holding him to one late catch for 8 yards on six targets.

“He said he was going to run us over or something,” Sherman said, then laughed.

According to Irvin, Graham’s talking once the game started was limited to “just a lot of cuss words and stuff like that. But that’s football, man. It is what it is.”
Does that stuff happen often before games?

“Nah,” Irvin said. “I asked him politely. I said, ‘We’re about to warm up.’ And he was like, ‘I’m Jimmy.’ I said, ‘Who is Jimmy?’And that’s when I hit the ball out of his hands and I kicked it across the field. That’s when we really got into it.”

Graham, 27, had 86 catches for 1,215 yards and 16 touchdowns this season. He’s due to hit free agency in March if the Saints don’t use the franchise tag or work out a multi-year contract first.


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