Maxx Crosby: Football "is my whole life"

The status of Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby has been a hot topic since he was told he'd be shut down for the final two games of the season and didn't react well. On Monday night, he spoke for himself on SiriusXM's Let’s Go! podcast.

Crosby's desire to keep playing, no matter what, was obvious.

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"For me, my love for the game has been since the day I started, since I could remember," Crosby told Jim Gray. "My whole life has been football and sports. That has been my obsession since I was a little kid. Yeah, I've always — I mean, I'm an addict to the core. I've had an obsessive mindset and that addictive personality my whole life.

"But when it comes to football, there's certain things that I truly believe in, and I feel like there's core principles that you gotta live by, and there's a certain way the game needs to be played. And there's a certain approach that you have when you go into the field. And the way you look at it, from my perspective, is you play to win. You play for your teammates, you put everything you have into the game, no matter what it is. There's gonna be bumps and bruises. You're gonna be banged up. That is a part of the game and the nature of the beast.”

Crosby said he knows he won't play forever.

“I never wanna look back and say I wish I would've, or I should've, done this," Crosby said. "I'm all in, and I've been all in since day one, and everybody that's with me on a daily basis knows my approach to this game. They could say I might be on edge. Sometimes I might be. But at the end of the day, they know my intentions. And when you have real relationships and you lead by action instead of words, when you go out there and show the guys, this is how we do it, this is how you work, and you prove it every day, that holds a lot more weight than words. Yeah, I love the game, man. This is my whole life."

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The 28-year-old Crosby has been a Raider for all of his NFL life. His comments about playing the game a certain way may or may not have been a comment about the team's decision to prevent him from playing the game the way he believes it should be played. But he wasn't asked about that.

Also unaddressed in the latest episode of Let's Go! was the question of whether Crosby wants to get away from the Raiders. It's the question of the moment, and it's absolutely a question that the man who once grilled Pete Rose should have posed to Crosby.

After all, it's the only thing anyone currently wants to know regarding Crosby's strong disagreement with the team's decision to shut him down due to a knee injury he'd been playing with for most of the season. Has the team poisoned the relationship? Will Crosby ask to be traded?

If athletes are going to have direct access to the fans, they need to embrace the obvious topics. For Crosby, the most obvious topic is whether the team's decision to not let him play at a time when he badly wanted to has made him feel differently about the organization.