Welcome to Beef Week! Over the next few days, The Ringer will continue its retrospective exploration of the past 25 years by delving into one of the quarter century’s defining features: delightfully petty feuds.
Cornerbacks and wide receivers have been at odds throughout the history of the NFL, but the beef between the two positions now seems more personal than ever. Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders may have formed the greatest cornerback-receiver matchup of all time when they faced off in the early 1990s, but there were no on-field altercations between the two. It was more rivalry than beef, even if they talked some trash. But any good sports beef is built on a foundation of hate. Personal hate. Not the kind of competitive hate that makes for a good rivalry over time. I’m talking about two athletes who just don’t fuck with each other for reasons that can’t be fully explained or rationalized.
Some of the most memorable corner-receiver beefs have origins that are either hard to pin down or just petty in nature—and almost all of them took place this century. We are in a golden age of NFL beef, and we have cornerbacks and receivers to thank for it.
All Things Beef Week
A Trailblazer in Beef: Wide Receiver Steve Smith Sr.
Smith, who spent most of his career with the Panthers, deserves a lot of the credit for escalating the tension between receivers and corners and kicking off this generation of hate. Smith played with the mentality of a cornerback. He once said that he approached the game from “a defensive-minded perspective,” which is just a sanitized way of saying that he enjoyed starting shit. Cornerbacks were all too willing to engage Carolina’s undersized star, but they rarely enjoyed the experience that followed. Smith’s entire game seemed to be fueled by hate and a desire to not only beat the competition in front of him but also embarrass them in the process. He picked up a few beefs along the way.
Smith’s breakout as an NFL superstar and generational antagonist came in 2005, when he won the receiving triple crown, leading the league in catches, yards, and touchdowns—and left the careers of a few notable cornerbacks in his wake. In a September game against the Dolphins, Smith took exception to a late hit from Miami’s former All-Pro cornerback Sam Madison. “Sam just pushed me to that place where my thought process was to just break him down,” Smith said years later. “He and a lot of people realized that pissing me off would do them a disservice.” Smith caught 11 passes for 170 yards and three touchdowns in a Carolina win that day.
But Madison got off easy compared with Vikings cornerback Fred Smoot, who made the mistake of talking trash ahead of Minnesota’s matchup with Carolina later that season and doing so while still embroiled in the infamous Vikings Love Boat scandal. Smith punctuated a 201-yard receiving day against Smoot by pretending to row a boat to celebrate a touchdown. Smoot had been viewed as one of the better cover corners in the league at the time, but his career went downhill from there, to the point where Smith later claimed that he had “destroyed” Smoot’s career and that he took pride in doing so.
Smith made that beef personal, and Smoot responded in an angry rant during a radio appearance. “I think he’s a bully,” Smoot said in 2013. “Actually, I think he’s a weak bully at that. … Put it like this: If I’m in a dark alley and I’m gonna fight a couple guys, I don’t want Steve Smith with me. He’s nothing but a talker, he’s soft. Come to Mississippi with that. That’s what you do. You come to Mississippi and we’ll teach you a couple lessons out there. We’ll show you how to be tough.”
Smoot was right about one thing: Smith was a bully, and his trash talk went far beyond what was typical at the time. Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson was the era’s most notable trash-talker, but he kept it light and entertaining. He was a comedian more than an instigator. Darrelle Revis and Randy Moss had a good rivalry going after joining the AFC East around the same time, but the most heated their trash talk got off the field was Revis calling Moss “a slouch” during an offseason interview. G-rated jabs at a player’s work ethic didn’t make for juicy headlines.
Smith’s anger-fueled game ushered in a new era of hate in the ongoing battle between receivers and cornerbacks, and there were a handful of cornerbacks who were more than willing to match his toxic energy. Smith had his run-ins with those guys, too, and may have even served as a key figure in their hater origin stories.
The most notable incident came during a midseason Monday Night Football game between the Panthers and Patriots in 2013. Smith was the only real viable receiving threat on Carolina at the time, so New England coach Bill Belichick asked his top cornerback, Aqib Talib, to follow Smith all over the field and play him physically. A fight seemed destined to break out at some point, and that moment came in the second quarter, when Talib refused to let go of Smith’s leg after tackling him to the ground. Talib’s helmet was ripped off in the ensuing fracas, but the fight was broken up before any major blows were exchanged.
The post-snap extracurriculars continued throughout the night, before Talib eventually left the game with a hamstring injury, leading Smith to famously tell Talib to “ice up, son” during his postgame interview.
Usually, players chill out later on in their careers, but Smith seemed to have more altercations with cornerbacks as he got older. He threw a young Richard Sherman to the ground during a post-snap shoving match in 2012. That season, Smith also nearly came to blows with Rams cornerback Janoris Jenkins and threatened to “bust him in the mouth” after the game.
"What I don't like is a young guy who comes in, who [this is] obviously his first time ever using the internet and Google, and he googles information about me, talks about my wife and stuff like that," Smith said of Jenkins. "That's just some of the bullshit I just don't play with. … When you try to take it personal like that, I don't have any great humbling things to say. So he can take his ass back to St. Louis and watch the fucking film.”
Smith was more than happy to take on the role of the old head who couldn’t believe how disrespectful these younger cornerbacks were getting—while ignoring that he had set the tone for this new era of disrespect. A few years later, as a member of the Ravens, Smith got into it with Jacksonville rookie Jalen Ramsey during postgame handshakes. That beef spilled over into the postgame locker rooms, with Ramsey telling a media scrum that he didn’t respect Smith “as a man.”
“I can really give a flying fuck,” Smith responded. “I've had two rookies that unfortunately, they have lost all respect for me. … Older [cornerbacks], they understand the respect game. These young guys, these new millennium guys, they don't really get it."
Smith should probably take some accountability for inspiring “these new millennium guys” to take receiver-corner beef to the next level. The new wave of cornerbacks simply matched his energy, and by the 2010s, they wrestled the heel role away from receivers and ran with it.
Cornerbacks Fight Back
Former Titans corner Cortland Finnegan was a generational shithead on the field who became a poster child for the pestering corner archetype. He was an undersized seventh-round pick out of Samford who liked to get into the heads of opposing receivers to make up for his physical limitations. Unsurprisingly, he and Smith had some on-field issues when they squared off, but Finnegan became a household name after he provoked Andre Johnson, the usually mild-mannered Texans star receiver, into dishing out an unforgettable ass beating.
Johnson later said that his outburst had been building up for three or four years and had nearly led to a brawl outside a nightclub about a year before the on-field incident, which resulted in ejections and $25,000 fines for both Johnson and Finnegan.
That sort of physical altercation between cornerbacks and wide receivers has become more common. While there are antagonists on both sides of the ball, cornerbacks have taken the lead as the primary shit starters in most of the notable beefs.
Perhaps this is in part because it’s never been harder to play cornerback, and those who do it are under more scrutiny than ever. The league has spent the past few decades rewriting the playbook to nerf pass coverage while the public is armed with all-22, coverage stats, and tracking data. If a cornerback has a bad game, there are a dozen clips of the lowlights on Twitter by noon on Monday, and PFF is posting metrics that put a number on just how badly he was beaten, down to the decimal point. I’m sure that covering Jerry Rice was a horrifying experience back in the day, but Deion Sanders and Darrell Green didn’t have to worry about bad film and coverage stats being thrown in their face after a poor performance.
On the flip side, wide receivers have never had it better. They’re getting paid at premium rates, the rule changes have made it easier to embarrass cornerbacks, and the passing boom has increased their opportunities to do so. It’s understandable if cornerbacks carry a little contempt for their positional opposites in their hearts—and unsurprising that they’ve become the biggest haters in the sport. It’s why they celebrate after an incompletion even if they didn’t cause it. They’re not celebrating a great play; they’re reveling in the failure of their opponents.
The potential for humiliation is already baked into the cornerback position, and they don’t need receivers like Smith trying to mix in even more. So the corners started fighting back. Sometimes, they caught a beatdown like Finnegan did or became a meme, but they picked up their fair share of Ws as well. The first decade of this century was dominated by trash-talking receivers like Smith, Chad Johnson, and Terrell Owens. The 2010s would belong to the cornerbacks, some of whom became the best beefers to ever do it.
An Axe to Grind: CB Richard Sherman
If Smith created the toxic environment between corners and receivers this century, Sherman deserves credit for maintaining it. Just a few months after Smith told Talib to ice up, the Seahawks cornerback cut the most memorable postgame interview of all time—a WWE-style promo aimed at 49ers receiver Michael Crabtree. Sherman had just made the game-winning play in the NFC championship game while in coverage against Crabtree when Fox’s Erin Andrews caught up with him for a postgame chat. Sherman unloaded on Crabtree, calling him a “sorry receiver.”
While there was an incident between the two players at a celebrity softball game years prior, Sherman later admitted that his real beef was with Jim Harbaugh, who was coaching the 49ers at the time. Harbaugh coached Sherman at Stanford and reportedly criticized his former player in conversations with teams before the 2011 NFL draft. So when Sherman said, “Don’t you ever talk about me again,” he wasn’t talking to Crabtree. He was talking to Harbaugh. The “sorry receiver” line was merely a stray that Crabtree caught.
Hate for the Sake of Hate: CB Aqib Talib
That wasn’t the only time Crabtree found himself on the wrong end of a beef he wasn’t necessarily seeking out. He also had run-ins with Talib, who twice snatched Crabtree’s gold chain during post-play altercations when Talib’s Broncos played Crabtree’s Raiders in 2016 and 2017. Talib and Crabtree are both from the Dallas area, both attended Big 12 schools, and matched up several times early in their NFL careers. But there were no notable altercations between the two before the infamous chain-snatching incidents, and Talib couldn’t offer a satisfactory explanation for why he did it.
“He’s just been wearing that chain all year, man,” said Talib after the second incident. “It’s just been growing on me. I said if he wears that chain in front of me, I’m going to snatch it off. He wore it in front of me, so I had to snatch it off.”
That’s some top-shelf hating right there, and that second incident – just three minutes into the game—devolved into an all-out brawl. It was later revealed that Crabtree had taped his chain to his body to prevent another chain snatching, but Talib couldn’t be denied. Both players were ejected and suspended for two games. Talib later admitted that he entered the game with the intention of snatching the chain so that he could put it on his pit bull for an Instagram post. Talib’s ultimate aim was public humiliation for Crabtree—perhaps the same level of embarrassment he felt after he was told to ice up on national television.
Wrong Place at the Wrong Time: CB Marshon Lattimore and WR Mike Evans
Plenty of the receiver-cornerback rivalries have hardly anything to do with football these days. Even a more organic beef between division rivals, like the one between Tampa Bay receiver Mike Evans and cornerback Marshon Lattimore, who spent most of his career in New Orleans and is now with the Commanders, was sparked by an indirect conflict. The two came to blows in their very first matchup in 2017, but the altercation was sparked by a third party, Jameis Winston, after the former Bucs quarterback poked Lattimore in the back of the head following a sideline run-in. Lattimore was confronting Winston when Evans came to his QB’s defense with a blindside hit that sent Lattimore to the turf. Evans was suspended a game for his role in the fight.
Evans later got a second one-game suspension after fighting with Lattimore during a game early in the 2022 season. Once again, he was coming to the defense of his quarterback, who had gotten into it with the Saints cornerback. “All I see is Lattimore like punching Lenny [Fournette] in the face or something like that, and then [he] pushed Tom [Brady],” said Evans after the game. “That's all I see. So I just pushed him.” Brady later took some responsibility for instigating the fight.
Evans vs. Lattimore might be the fiercest player rivalry in the league today, and it may have never developed if not for two quarterbacks provoking Lattimore first. I don’t blame Lattimore for taking the bait, and the league hasn’t gone out of its way to punish him for his role in the ongoing Evans beef. While the Bucs star has been fined more than $100,000 by the league and suspended twice as a result of the three separate incidents, Lattimore was hit with just one $13,367 fine.
CBs Looking for a Beef: Josh Norman and Jaire Alexander
Usually, though, it’s the cornerback who starts these incidents. Giants WR Odell Beckham Jr. was goaded into a short-lived but memorable feud with the Panthers’ Josh Norman late in the 2015 season. Norman was a late-round pick with a point to prove, and trash talk had become a hallmark of his game. Beckham took the bait, and the two had several altercations during a thrilling win for the Panthers.
That beef continued the following season, when Norman joined the NFC East in Washington. Outside of a bizarre game that also involved a frustrated Beckham beating up a kicking net on the sideline, things fizzled out. Norman found other receivers to beef with, including DeAndre Hopkins and Crabtree, while Beckham was largely beef-free in the later years of his career.
It was former Packers CB Jaire Alexander’s pregame trash talk in 2022 that sparked his beef with Stefon Diggs, which led to a pregame scuffle between the two before last season’s Texans-Packers game even kicked off. Diggs didn’t exactly shy away from the beef, so he’s not totally innocent here. “I’m never the bigger person,” he told reporters last October. “I ain’t letting shit go.”
A Truly Personal Beef: CB Jalen Ramsey and WR Golden Tate
These beefs have provided us with memorable moments but not a lot of memorable plays. The winners haven’t been decided by the results on the field—I’ve included a lot of video clips, and very few of them have been football highlights—but by who got the last laugh or won the most viral moment. Football is merely a backdrop for all of the drama. There isn’t a better illustration of that than the rivalry between Ramsey and Tate, which may have developed even if the two had never picked up a football. It’s a messy situation, so I’ll just let Tate explain:
“Him and one of my twin sisters have two children together,” Tate said on a podcast earlier this year. “Now things happened within that relationship where I don’t think my sister was done or treated the way she should have been treated. And when that happens, who you gotta come see? You gotta come see big bro.”
The relationship between Ramsey and Tate’s sister ended in 2019, and things got heated a year later, when Tate’s Giants took on Ramsey’s Rams during the 2020 season. On a pivotal play, Ramsey ran through a block and blew up Tate on a short pass to the flat, but that wasn’t enough for him. According to Tate, the Rams corner later approached him at midfield after the final whistle and took a swing at him before words were even exchanged. That led to a brawl between the two teams while Tate and Ramsey wrestled on the turf.
“On sight, we knew what we was gonna do,” Ramsey said in a 2022 interview about the 2020 incident. “I mean, that’s his sister, that’s what he supposed to do, too. But you mind your business, too. This is me too now.”
It’s like Ramsey didn’t know who was in the right, and he didn’t care. He just wanted a fight. Ramsey has never turned down an opportunity to beef. We’ve already covered his issues with Smith. He also talked enough shit to get A.J. Green to unleash a flurry of punches to the back of his head during the first half of a 2017 game between Ramsey’s Jaguars and Green’s Bengals. He has found himself in plenty of contentious matchups against star receivers, including Tyreek Hill, Hopkins, and Diggs. He just seems to have a knack for pissing off his opponent. So it’s fitting that Ramsey’s first high-profile altercation with a receiver was with Smith, the player who set the disrespectful tone for this toxic era and may have created this wave of beef-hungry cornerbacks who’ve kept it going.
