The Green Bay Packers earned the right to talk all they like after bombarding the visiting Chicago Bears at Lambeau Field on Sunday, October 11, and linebacker Zaire Franklin did precisely that when setting his sites on the Chicago Bears, and specifically wide receiver Luther Burden III, during a postgame interview.
Franklin first called out Chicago for speaking and behaving strangely with regards to the Packers specifically.
“They do a whole lot of weird stuff,” Franklin said, per Matt Schneidman of The Athletic. “Since I been here, they do a whole lot of stuff that they worried about us. We worried about ourselves. Hopefully they learn to stop dissing us. Real talk.”
Franklin joined the Packers this offseason and has been a member of the franchise for exactly five regular season games. He was a member of the Indianapolis Colts when the Bears came back from 18 points down to best the Packers in the first round of the playoffs back in January.
Zaire Franklin in His Feelings About Luther Burden’s Comments
Franklin then lined up Burden, speaking directly in response to a quote from the second-year wide receiver from earlier in the week.
“Zaire Franklin just unloaded on Luther Burden, who said the Bears wanted to make the Packers quit,” Schneidman wrote in a separate post to X. “Said Burden has never done anything in the league.”
“He quit today,” Franklin said of Burden. “He didn’t wanna play no more.”
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A reporter asked Burden on Monday about Bears head coach Ben Johnson’s approach to playing the Packers and his attitude toward the rival franchise.
It was during Burden’s response to that question that he uttered the words to which Franklin took exception.
“I feel like he wants to beat them really bad, like everybody else in the room, every Chicago fan,” Burden said, per Michael Dwojak of Bears Insider. “We just want to beat them real bad and make them quit.”
Johnson famously screamed “[Expletive] the Packers!” multiple times in the Bears’ home locker room following Chicago’s comeback victory last postseason.
That reaction, and Burden’s response Monday to a question from the media calling back to it, may fall short of Franklin’s description of it all as “weird,” especially given the length and intensity of the rivalry stretching back more than a century.
But Franklin — a one-time Pro Bowler whose teams have made the playoffs twice and won a single postseason game between 2018-25 — spent the entirety of his first eight years in relative obscurity in Indianapolis and appears unfamiliar with the concept of an NFL rivalry that raises to the heights of the one between Chicago and Green Bay.
Welcome to the show, Franklin.
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