There is no report saying the Eagles WILL release Cary Williams

This morning, Paul Domowitch of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote an article discussing the idea that the Eagles secondary will undergo some major changes this off-season. Bradley Fletcher’s performance late in the season probably put the Eagles in the position of no-return with the 28 year-old corner, who will likely walk in free-agency. But Domowitch also believes that there is very little chance that Cary Williams will return in 2015.

"The other starting corner, Cary Williams, still has a year left on his deal. But his salary-cap number will jump from $6.4 million to $8.1 million, and unless he’s willing to take a sizable pay cut, he also probably won’t be back."

I echoed Domo’s statements last offseason, but those were under different circumstances. Fletcher, I felt, outperformed Williams in 2013. I assumed that if a similar situation unfolded during 2014, Fletcher would be offered a new contract and the Eagles would move on from the outspoken Williams. That didn’t exactly happen.

Not to underscore the fact that Williams was inconsistent at best in coverage, publicly questioned Chip Kelly’s tactics twice going back to training camp and was extremely undisciplined on the field, but Fletcher was so bad the first five and last five games of the season that the Eagles can’t bring him back. That’s a done deal.

In an ideal scenario, the Eagles would get Williams’ borderline cancerous ego out of the locker-room with Fletcher and Domowitch laid out why that is fairly likely situation. He DID NOT report that. He speculated. There’s nothing wrong with speculation, especially considering that he didn’t try to dress his speculation up as a report. He speculated, but in the 24/7 world of lazy Twitter users and certain blogs/sites  just running with things, that was somehow twisted into this.

*Editors note: Numerous other reporters and sources, including RotoWorld, incorrectly passed along the same news. Many of since have backed off the report. The goal of this article was to inform Eagles fans that some information sources got the news wrong. If anyone took the bottom part personally, that wasn’t my intention. Part of reporting on sports is that if you get things wrong, you will be corrected. It comes with the territory. The fans deserve to know the correct information, I think.*

No, they didn’t.  First of all, Philly.com is a combined site for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. Paul Domowitch writes for the Daily News, not the Inquirer. It literally says Philadelphia Daily News next to Domowitch’s name.

Secondly, we’ve established that there was no actual report. The top Twitter account, constantly takes things out of context, so whatever they say should kind of just be ignored. 

I get it–I’m splitting hairs. Cary Williams probably will be released. But there was no report that Cary Williams will be released, especially not from the Philadelphia Inquirer.  The reason that these type of things tend to bother me is that there is this prehistoric set of ideals across both the local and national sports landscape that if you aren’t a huge media outlet, and you don’t have a TV station and/or radio station to back you up, your site/blog can’t provide valuable discussion on sports. That isn’t the case at all. Internet sports talk and sports sites are the next wave and anyone who hasn’t jumped on by nearly 2015, is going to be left in the past, if they haven’t already.

But until blogs and people who work for media outlets that already don’t have a great reputation stop taking things out of context and using Twitter to spread their wrong information like wildfire, internet sports talk and websites will always come with a certain stigma. And that doesn’t just go for the sites that these writers work for, it goes for ones like thiswhoare lumped in thesamecategory just because all three sites are “blogs”.