Tom Condon says he told Sam Bradford to ask the Eagles for a trade, but that might not be true

Sam Bradford and his agent Tom Condon have both received a lot of (deserved) heat due to their failed attempt to at forcing a trade out of Philadelphia. One can wonder, though, which one of the two actually initiated the trade request. Appearing in an interview on The Stephen A. Smith show, Condon said it was him who told Bradford to ask for the trade.

Condon: "And so I told Sam, ‘My recommendation is this: you don’t attend [practice], you tell them you want to get traded, which indicates to other teams in the league that you’re potentially available or that Philadelphia may at least want to talk about it and clearly there’s the Denver Broncos, the Super Bowl team, who have lost both their starting former quarterbacks.’ And so you’d have to anticipate they were going to be in the market, and they were, and so they came to Philadelphia to try to get a quarterback. They didn’t get him, so they got [one] in the draft."

SMITH: So Mr. Condon, for clarification purposes, what you’re saying to my audience right now is that this isn’t some situation where Sam Bradford came to you and said ‘I want out.’ This is you, being the extraordinary agent that you are, advising him that this is no longer a good situation for you [and] we need to move on in effort to look out for the best interest of your future. You advised him to take that position — it wasn’t Sam Bradford advising you to take that position?

CONDON: "Right. That’s correct. I prefer to be the agent and let him be the player."

Whether Condon is telling the truth or not is up for debate since we shouldn't really expect him to say anything that would make Bradford look like the bad guy. Bradford is the one who has to be in the locker room. Bradford is one who has to face the media and fans. I'm not saying I know Condon is lying, but I am saying he easily could be in order to protect his client's image.

Besides, there's some evidence that points to Bradford being the one who came to Condon demanding the trade. This is what ESPN's Sal Paolantonio had to say in a recent interview on 97.5 The Fanatic, via Birds 24/7:

"[Bradford] did not like the idea that the Eagles had traded up to No. 2, and expressed his displeasure rather emphatically," Paolantonio said. "[He] walked out of the meeting and told him that he was leaving and he wanted to be traded and he was going back to Oklahoma.

"He left NovaCare rather abruptly, went back to Oklahoma and then on the way to Oklahoma … he called Tom Condon and told him what he was going to do, and then Condon was stuck trying to figure out what to do with Sam Bradford."

...

"Bradford was driving this decision," Paolantonio said, "not his agent."

Even if we give Bradford the benefit of the doubt and say it was Condon who nudged him into asking for a trade, it's still ultimately Bradford's decision. He can't act like he wanted to be in Philadelphia all along and he accidentally took bad advice from Condon. Bradford has done nothing to separate himself from Condon's public agenda.

At this point it doesn't really matter whether it was Bradford or Condon who asked for the trade. Their attempt failed and Bradford returned to practice earlier this week. Now it's up to the veteran quarterback to make the most of an awkward situation that all could have been easily avoided.

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