Seahawks QB Josh Portis was waived on Tuesday after the news of his Cinco de Mayo DUI arrest was revealed to the public on Monday. New details of the circumstance of the backup quarterback’s impaired driving arrest have emerged — and fans are beginning to complain about player antics on the troubled Seattle Seahawks team.
The May 5 DUI bust was a shocker because struggling QB Portis had been released from the Seahawks once before. He’d held a two-year contract potentially worth almost a million dollars for less than two months since the early April signing.
Portis practiced with the Seahawks Monday, but it was an already open question whether or not he’d make the backup slot against tough competitors Brady Quinn and Jerrod Johnson. The Seahawks would-be quarterback was probably in the battle of his life for his football career.
His agent JR Rickert was shocked too, taking to Twitter to blast the news media for reporting on the DUI. In a Monday night tweet that has since been removed, Rickert reportedly said: “[O]ur client #Seahawks QB Josh Portis: he was NOT arrested at all…”
CBS Sports reporter Ryan Wilson described the scene of the arrest in some detail, explaining that the Washington State trooper who pulled Portis over could smell alcohol and asked him to step out of the car.
In a move that echoes the recent Reese Witherspoon disorderly conduct arrest , his female passenger also got out of the car and began to scold the officer. According to the police report, she began to cry and told him that he was arresting a Seahawk: “[She] shouted at me and stated she couldn’t believe that I was from Seattle, and was arresting a Seahawk.”
It has been a bad couple of weeks for the Seattle Seahawks, with suspended player Bruce Irvin scheduled to miss the first four games for violating the NFL PEDs policy. Now this.
One blogger suggested that coach Pete Carroll could deflect some of the bad publicity by bringing in Tim Tebow . It would be a circus, sure, but it would sure draw attention away from Bruce Irvin and Josh Portis.
[Josh Portis photo by Jeffrey Beall via Wikimedia Commons]
