Ian Rapoport does not think it was a laughing matter that he was deliberately misled by former NFL head coach Mike Mularkey.
Earlier this week, Mularkey appeared on a sports talk show in Jacksonville and revealed that he called Rapoport, the star NFL insider, in 2018 and told the reporter that he was getting a contract extension with the Titans when he actually knew he’d be fired.
After seeing the clip, Rapoport revealed how he felt about it on “The Insiders,” the show he co-hosts on NFL Network.
Rapoport was of the belief that Mularkey pulled the stunt not with the intent to mess with him as a journalist, per se, but to create an embarrassing media circus for his soon-to-be former bosses.
“Those guys, yukking it up — pretty funny, for them, I guess,” Rapoport said on NFL Network. “If you don’t care about accuracy and taking someone’s reputation and rubbing it in the mud. Everyone said Mike Mularkey’s a good guy — he always was to me. I liked him. Thought he was very respectable. That is not cool. That’s not funny. I was a younger reporter then and the amount of online hate and ridicule I got, because Mike Mularkey thought it would be funny to get back at his old boss, it was not fun. So, I don’t have much to say. I don’t blame Mike Mularkey. But I want to. That was not cool and that was not funny. And we should treat truth better than that.”
Mularkey made his original comments this past Wednesday on “The Jaguars Hour with Brent & Austen.”
“The best thing I did there at the end, which I can now talk about was, when I got called in that Monday morning after the New England game, I knew they were going to fire me,” Mularkey said, as covered by Awful Announcing. “So Sunday night I called Ian Rapoport and I said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you know this but I’m going to break it to you. But I’m getting a new contract in the morning.’ And he reported it. It was all over the country that I was getting a contract in the morning.”
During the 2017-18 season, the Titans went 9-7 and beat the Chiefs in the AFC Wild Card round before losing 35-14 to the Patriots.