McCoy: ‘I Got Nothing To Say’

LeSean McCoy. (Jeff Fusco)

LeSean McCoy didn’t wait to shake hands. Not today.

Before the clock ticked zero, McCoy slipped into the southeastern tunnel at Lincoln Financial Field with nary a nod to his former teammates, turning the corner into the hallway in the belly of the stadium with a steely rage. Eagles fans rained boos on the team’s all-time leading rusher, just as they had when he was introduced as the Bills’ lone captain before the game.

He walked down the hall, turned into the visiting locker room, and peeled off his helmet, launching it, full force, into a wall near a gray metal container marked with a laminated piece of paper that read “25” in blue-and-red block font.

When he returned to his locker after a shower, McCoy was no more pleased. A horde of reporters, most familiar, a few auxiliary, turned their collective heads as he approached in nothing but lime green underwear.

“Y’all about to watch me dress?” he muttered, perturbed.

He slowly dressed himself in a pitch-black outfit — long-sleeve t-shirt, jeans, belt, shoes — save his glimmering silver belt buckle, the letter H.

He turned to the reporters, still waiting to talk to the running back after his Bills lost to his former team, 23-20 in a hard-nosed, mistake-filled game.

McCoy didn’t lift his head, still gazing down to the floor at an angle.

“I don’t got nothing to say.”

He sliced through the gathered media contingent and out into that hallway once more, a trail of television cameras and reporters following. Out in the parking lot, McCoy hugged a man dressed head-to-toe in Eagles team garb, and grimaced when a camera tried to get a shot of his face.

His silver Ford SUV sat, waiting, in the back left corner of the visiting parking lot, under a greying sky.

As quickly as McCoy had escaped the locker room, he disappeared from the stadium, his all-black outfit blurring into the night.

In his first game in Philadelphia since the Eagles traded him to the Bills for Kiko Alonso, McCoy ran for 74 yards on 20 carries and caught four passes for 35 yards. He bounced up and down on the sidelines as teams warmed up, and when he met the Eagles’ captains at mid-field, he knelt down and kissed the Eagles logo.

The 27-year-old back hid nothing. This game was his Super Bowl.

“Early in the week, he came in the building, getting in guys’ faces, just kind of building it up, letting us know he really wanted it,” Bills running back Boobie Dixon said after the game. “And we really wanted it for him.”

McCoy exploded for 63 yards in the first half on just 12 carries, bouncing runs and shaking off would-be tacklers the way he often did in this city when he ran for 6,792 yards with the Eagles.

But in the second half, the gears ground to a halt.

“We had plenty of opportunities to get the run game going,” Bills guard Richie Incognito said. “We were gaining some momentum in the first half, and then I think it’s just typical of this team, we come out in the second half a little flat.”

McCoy couldn’t crack a hole in the Eagles’ defensive line, getting swallowed up by Fletcher Cox, who tackled McCoy for a 10-yard loss with six and a half minutes left to play, pushing McCoy into the turf for good measure. When Cox extended a hand to help McCoy up, the running back refused, pushing away.

It never got better; the Bills’ lineman committed penalty after penalty, negating forward progress and frustrating McCoy to no end.

“He was into it,” Incognito said. “He was barking at [the offensive line] for the penalties, and rightfully so.”

But the barking didn’t yield a response, and so McCoy marched off the field, to the beat of his own drum, disinterested in handshakes.

“He was upset,” Dixon admitted. “But I know he’s a fierce competitor. I know he’s going to come back next week, ready to work. It’ll take a couple of days for him to get over it, but I’m sure he will, because he’s a pro.”

Tonight, there were no traces of a pro ready to move on.