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| Jackson's now denying he pulled the trigger on the Palmer trade. (Getty Images) |
Hue Jackson, it's widely believed, dug his own grave with the Raiders. His fiery end-of-season presser probably didn't endear him to new Oakland GM Reggie McKenzie. And neither did the midseason trade for Carson Palmer, which Jackson made the ultimate decision on.
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Or did he? Jackson, appearing on 95.7 The Fan in San Francisco, was asked if his role in the trade was unfairly portrayed in the media, and that he wasn't the guy who pulled trigger on bringing Palmer to Oakland.
"No it wasn’t," Jackson said, via SportsRadioInterviews.com. "I did coach and recruit Carson in college, I was with him in Cincinnati, I do know Mike Brown because I did work there so naturally everybody is going to say it was Hue that did it. Well no, Hue was the person when it was all said and done that was able to get the sides together. The decision was made as an organization. I don’t make a decision to give away draft picks, I didn’t make a decision on how much money someone was going to make. That’s not my domain. I don’t do that.
"But no I’m not the only person. I was just a player involved in it because I knew the two parties and I knew how to get the two parties together to see if we could potentially do a deal."
We don't know how true this is. We just don't; maybe all Jackson did was get two groups of people in the same room (or on the same phone line) and grease the wheels.
But in the wake of the Raiders getting Palmer, Jackson did call it "probably the greatest trade in football." This clearly wasn't the case, because the 4-2 Raiders finished the season 8-8 and in third place in the AFC West.
The point being, though, that those aren't words coming from someone who simply brought two parties together. It was the sort of trade that, depending on how 2011 played out, might not sit well with a general manager.
Whether or not that was actually the case is now apparently a he-said/he-said sort of thing.
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