Boomer Esiason doubles down on Abdul Carter criticism after viral rant

Boomer Esiason doubled down on his Abdul Carter criticism Wednesday, insisting his problem with the Giants linebacker has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a player who spent his entire rookie year giving his organization reasons to question his judgment.

In case you missed it, Esiason unloaded on Carter on WFAN on Tuesday after the Giants’ 2025 first-round pick posted “Thought this sh!t was AI, what we doing man” on X in response to teammate Jaxson Dart introducing Donald Trump at a rally in New York last Friday. Carter later said the two had spoken and were fine. That was not enough for Esiason, who called Carter’s post a “boneheaded error,” questioned his maturity, and declared there was “only one man on that call and that was Jaxson Dart.”

The clip made the rounds, and on Wednesday, Esiason insisted that anyone reading politics into his criticism was missing the point.

“Jaxson Dart wasn’t political at all, but I guess people would say that since he was there, he was supporting the president, which is fine. He’s allowed to do that,” Esiason said.

“It’s amazing how people just take what you say,” he continued. “And basically, I was pretty harsh on Abdul Carter for a reason. If you are around here and you’re following the Giants and you saw what Mike Kafka ended up having to do to make an example out of Abdul Carter with the way that he was acting — that’s part of his story as the New York Giants, which was completely underwhelming. And this is a guy who was looking for number 11, because that was his college number, I guess. Then he was looking for number 56. The guy is completely clueless to what’s the things that he was asking for when he first got here.

“Just play football, man. Be your best self, be the guy that everybody needs you to be, and be that game wrecker that you were supposedly at Penn State, and everybody was excited about having you here, and then you pull what you pulled last year on the field and in the locker room, and basically, one of the reasons why a guy lost his job. So yeah, why would you decide to embroil yourself into a social media fight when you didn’t have to do that.”

The problem is that Esiason’s argument only holds if you ignore his own track record on the subject. He has spent the better part of his sports media career telling athletes to stay out of politics — imploring Olympian Hunter Hess to “pipe down and respect the flag” as recently as this past winter — and is now defending the athlete who walked onto a political stage as the starting quarterback of the New York Giants and put his entire locker room in an impossible position. Dart made a choice. Carter reacted to it. The idea that one of those things is a “boneheaded error” and the other is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” is only coherent if you already agree with Dart’s politics, which Esiason has made no secret of doing.

“He’s doing the thing that Boomer doesn’t want him to do, and Boomer is defending him,” Dan Le Batard Show producer Mike Ryan said.

Esiason can insist this was never about politics, but that argument gets a lot harder to sell when the athlete he’s defending willingly stepped onto a political stage in the first place.