Mike Francesa Is on a Warpath Against Ode Hell Beckham Today

Mike Francesa has been a vocal critic of Odell Beckham Jr. since last season, and even got in a fight with Ben McAdoo about the receiver this past October. For the first hour of the Pope’s show today, he’s been in rare form, saying that Beckham never would have been a star in past eras because that used to come from winning, but now that elevation comes from “outrageous behavior.”

Going on the boat in Miami has not drawn Francesa’s ire thus far as much as running around shirtless before the game at Lambeau yesterday. Videos, as always with Francesa, are via Sports Funhouse.

" Mike Francesa kills Odell Beckham Jr. pic.twitter.com/n44KPFpzrs — Funhouse (@SportsFunhouse) January 9, 2017 "

" Mike doesn’t think that the #Packers were impressed by @OBJ_3 and @TeamVic walking around in the pregame with their shirts off. pic.twitter.com/LzvddUQC7Q — Funhouse (@SportsFunhouse) January 9, 2017 "

As I said in my recap from Lambeau, OBJ is a lot like Cam Newton in the sense that if you are going to be an overt attention seeker, your performance on the field has to be unimpeachable.

The comparison with Gronk has come up in other discussions — why is his partying perceived differently than Beckham’s?  Well, Gronk did catch a heaping load of shit for dancing on a bad ankle after a Super Bowl loss, but beyond that I can’t recall his partying being an issue during a season, and whenever he is healthy he goes out there and rakes. (For an interesting discussion about this previously, Dan Le Batard once wondered how Gronk would be perceived if he were black.)

Anyways, here are some fun phonetic transcriptions from the inimitable Mike Francesa NY Twitter account (which coined the Ode Hell Beckham name I used in the title) this afternoon: