No, A.J. Brown did not say he "leaked" Eagles stories to the media

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From Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning, I partially unplugged for the wedding of my niece. I'm back in the saddle, and I was taken aback by something that became a thing on Thursday. It became a given in multiple media circles — from those who have a history of warping reality for engagement (like " Dov Kleiman ," who isn't really Dov Kleiman but whoever it was that bought Kleiman's Twitter account more than two years ago) to those who know or should know better (like former ESPN personality Trey Wingo). Both "Kleiman" and Wingo (and more than a few others) claimed that Patriots receiver A.J. Brown, during his recent interview with Maria Taylor, admitted that he "leaked" stories to the media in an effort to motivate the Eagles. Brown never said that. Allow me to repeat this, with emphasis: BROWN NEVER SAID THAT. Here's the key exchange in the interview. Maria Taylor asked Brown if he felt that the picture painted of Brown in Philly made him out to be a villain. "I wouldn't say 'a villain,' because some of the things that was done, it was done purposely to give us a push, you know?" Brown said. "I know if I said something in the media, I know it's gonna propel us to work on it, because now everybody's talking about it. You know, so it's like are we gonna really — are we gonna fix it or not? We can't keep saying, 'It's the standard, it's the standard.' And we're not trying to truly get better. "I'm not saying that we weren't, but I know if you say what you need to say in the media — which I won't do that anymore — but it gives everything legs, and legs . . . to push everybody to be better. Because pressure isn't always a bad thing. It can also be a good thing, too. It just depends on how you look at it. And we had guys in the locker room — which was, honestly, I feel like it was OK to do because we had guys and a lot of them who were men you know, and it's like, yeah, 'I know I need to do this. I need to do that,' including myself. "So you felt like basically some of the things you would say in the media in ways were a strategy in hopes of helping your team become the best version of themselves?" Taylor said. "Nothing I would say was for personal gain," Brown said. "It was always to help the team win, and try to be our better self." One of the best examples of that dynamic happened in November, when Brown addressed at his locker the Twitch stream comment to "get rid of me" from your fantasy team. “We can’t just keep slapping a Band-Aid over the defense doing their job and getting us out of trouble,” Brown told reporters the next day. “At what point are we going to pick up our slack as an offense that we say we’re so great? . . . And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s not about, ‘I don’t care about winning, all I care about is stats.’ No. It’s been week after week sometimes we’re not contributing, we’re not doing our job on offense. You can’t keep slapping a Band-Aid over that and expect to win late in the year and think you’re going to go to that at the end of the year. It’s not going to fucking happen.” At the time, our position was that Brown was sufficiently selfless in his desire for the offense to improve that he was willing to be labeled as selfish regarding comments that many viewed as the same-old gripes from a diva receiver who wants the quarterback to just give him the damn ball . The message went beyond Brown's stats. The offense wasn't growing. It wasn't evolving. It was hiding behind the fact that the Eagles were winni…