Buffalo Bills captain says Josh Allen may need to address racist tweets
By admin - 2018-04-27 16:51:34

The Buffalo Bills landed one of the NFL Draft’s top quarterback prospects in Wyoming’s Josh Allen with its first round pick Thursday night, but linebacker and team captain Lorenzo Alexander is more concerned with Allen’s social media history at the moment.

A number of racially insensitive Twitter posts from when Allen was in high school in 2012 and 2013 surfaced this week, and Alexander says the No. 7 overall pick will have to explain them to his new teammates at some point, according to ESPN.

“He’s gonna have to at some point, whether he does it in front of the whole team or one-off, somebody’s gonna ask him, ‘Why did you say that?’ Or ‘Why were you quoting those words?,'” Alexander told the Bills’ official radio program, adding that he’s confident Allen can convince teammates that he was just a kid at the time and made a horrible mistake. “He’s gonna have to have a good answer. I’ve listened to a couple of interviews, and I think it’s gonna come from the heart and he’ll be fine. But he’s gonna maybe have to work a little bit harder to get respect from certain people in the locker room, but I don’t think it’s an issue, because that’s who he was and not who he is.”

The tweets in question, which have since been deleted, were reportedly littered with racial slurs and other offensive language. For his part, Allen immediately apologized after the tweets were published Wednesday. He told ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith that some of the tweets referenced rap lyrics and television dialogue, including a quote from an episode of the sitcom “Modern Family.”