In Exhibit #4357 of how you just can’t joke around with anyone anymore, a Dallas radio host has apologized for what was very obviously a sarcastic joke about wishing injury on San Francisco’s Christian McCaffrey.
The Cowboys are set to take on the 49ers this weekend in yet another post-season chapter of the epic rivalry between the two teams. In the build-up to that, Bryan Broaddus, a Dallas radio host who also works for the Cowboys as a reporter, was doing his show with co-host Gavin Dawson on 105.3 FM when the subject turned to San Francisco’s star running back, Christian McCaffrey.
After discussing how great McCaffrey has been since getting traded to the 49ers from Carolina earlier this year, Broaddus and Dawson brought up McCaffrey’s injury history in Carolina.
“He’s healthy now,” Broaddus said about McCaffrey. “In Carolina, he couldn’t stay healthy. Now he never gets hurt.”
“We could use an injury. We really could,” Dawson said.
“Hamstring would be good,” Broaddus replied.
Listening to the exchange, it’s clear the two were engaging in a light-hearted and humorous talk about a great player who is likely to make things very difficult for Dallas on Sunday. Instead, people apparently can’t handle that kind of sarcasm and humor and freaked out.
Oddly, even though it was Dawson who said, “we could use an injury,” Broaddus ended up apologizing for it on Twitter.
Just very dumb, but this is our world. By the way, the hosts are completely right: McCaffrey was almost never on the field in Carolina, and now you can’t get him off the field. That’s an odd development, for sure. However, the way to read Broaddus and Dawson’s exchange is to see it for what it is, a compliment to McCaffrey. No one jokes about an injury to a backup. They only joke about players who would actually make a difference.
In any event. Sports talk radio used to be a place where you could talk and joke about things related to sports. Sadly, like so many other areas of our media and culture, that is no longer the case.