CJ Gardner-Johnson got beat on the game-winning touchdown Sunday night, then stood at his own podium and called the guy who beat him a practice squad scrub, a flex that only works if you don’t check the transaction wire first.
Drake Maye found Efton Chism III for a 23-yard, one-handed touchdown with 1:50 left, the strike that flipped a quiet night in Buffalo into a 29-26 win for the New England Patriots, improving them to 3-2 while handing the Bills their second loss of the season. Maye followed it up by finding Rhamondre Stevenson for the two-point conversion, because apparently one dagger wasn’t enough content for the night. Gardner-Johnson’s read on all of it, postgame: “A practice squad player made a helluva play. You do it again, he probably won’t make it again.”
Chism has never been on a practice squad in his life, not for a day. He signed with New England as a 2025 undrafted free agent out of Western Washington and has made the 53-man roster in each of the last two seasons, which is the exact opposite of the résumé Gardner-Johnson tried to pin on him.
He reached for an insult without bothering to check the stat sheet.
Vrabel didn’t need a press release to clean it up. He handled it straight from his own podium, and the whole thing got passed around before the ink was dry.
https://x.com/MySportsUpdate/status/2107094788277157986
That’s the entire rebuttal, delivered with a shrug: “For a guy that’s been on eight teams in four years, I mean I guess he knows the drill.” It lands because every word of it checks out. New Orleans drafted Gardner-Johnson in the fourth round back in 2019, and since then he’s rotated through Philadelphia twice, Detroit, Houston, a practice squad stop of his own in Baltimore, Chicago, and now Buffalo. Vrabel also went out of his way to call Chism “very well-respected” and said nobody on the roster works harder, which is the kind of detail you only bother adding when you know you’ve already won the exchange.
The receipts do most of the damage, but there’s a sliver of a defense buried in here. Teams elevate receivers off practice squads for exactly these kinds of spots all the time, so the insult itself isn’t some invented genre of trash talk, it’s a real NFL category Gardner-Johnson just happened to aim at the one guy who doesn’t belong in it. That’s less malice than laziness, the sports equivalent of forgetting someone’s name and guessing wrong in front of a room full of reporters.
None of it changes what happened on the field. Maye’s MVP-caliber season picked up another data point in front of a sellout crowd at Buffalo’s $2.1 billion stadium, and Gardner-Johnson walked out of it having lost the rep battle twice in one night.
I hate the Patriots on principle, Jets fan, don’t at me, but watching a guy on his eighth team in four years get handed his own paperwork is good television no matter who’s standing at the podium.
