‘He said he was going to kill me’ — Jaguars punter hurls insane trash talk at Titans’ running back in Week 13 loss

All kinds of wild stuff takes places on an NFL field that you can’t always appreciate from afar. Cheap shots get taken at the bottom of the pile. Guys get spit on (which seems to have made a real comeback this season for some reason). And some truly outrageous trash talk gets hurled back and forth. There’s no telling how much unrepeatable jawing takes place on any given Sunday. And you’d think that after playing in the league for a couple of years, you’d have heard it all.

Well, apparently that wasn’t the case for Titans RB Julius Chestnut in Week 13. He got into it with the Jaguars punter of all people, and claims he got a wild threat he’d never heard before.

Logan Cooke told Julius Chestnut he’d kill him

The Titans and Jaguars tend to be a pretty chippy matchup. This past Sunday, that was certainly the case as the Jags blew Tennessee out 25-3 in Nashville. A stat I heard from Nick Suss at the Tennessean sums it up nicely: this was the first game this season where both teams were penalized 10+ times and assessed 80+ penalty yards.

One of the scrappiest moments came on a Jaguars punt, when Julius Chestnut got into it with Jaguars punter Logan Cooke. Cooke ran up to Chestnut as the play ended and the two began pushing and shoving, attracting a gaggle of players from both sides.

In the locker room after the game, Chestnut was incredulous over what Cooke had to say to him in that moment.

“I don’t really know why the punter did that,” Chestnut explained. “Honestly, I was just trying to play hard. And he came up to me and said he was going to kill me. So I don’t know what made him do that.”

Hearing that from anybody in a football game has to be pretty wild, but for it to come from the punter of all people? That’s equal parts jarring and hilarious.

“I don’t think it was any frustration, I think it was just us playing hard,” Chestnut continued. “Me and the other guy were just playing hard, and I think he just wanted something to say. Honestly, I have no idea… that was surprising to me, I’d never anything like that before.”

All’s fair in love and war, so I don’t think anybody took this “death threat” in a heated moment particularly seriously. But then again, who am I to judge the unwritten rules of NFL smack talk. Are there boundaries? And if so, what are they? How out of bounds is a comment like this?

The fact that Chestnut had never heard it before and was so taken aback by it seems to indicate this might fall outside of the typical fair play window. But hey, the Jags want you to go vote for Logan Cooke for the Pro Bowl when you get a second!