Taylor Decker suffered both in Sunday’s 20-0 misfortune to the Carolina Panthers.
The Detroit Lions left tackle left pregame warmups early for an obscure reason, however he played each snap of offense with no evident issue.
On Monday, Decker uncovered the secret behind his unexpected takeoff from the field: Blisters brought about by his dress shoes.
“I mean everybody’s dealing with stuff all year,” Decker said Monday in a conference call. “I’ve got plenty of things I’m dealing with. I actually headed (to the locker room) early because my dress shoes gave me blisters and I wanted to put blister pads on. With that being said, everybody’s dealing with stuff. Everybody’s got stuff that’s nagging at them and as the season wears on you just have to manage it.
“But I know I’ve said this before, if you’re out there and you’re playing you’re expected to perform and I expect myself to perform at my best for every single snap I’m out there on the field and I expect to play every single snap of every single game no matter what.”
The particular issue with the dress shoes was that Decker hadn’t worn them much as of late.
“This is going to sound like a strange answer,” he said. “Even though we’ve dressed up a lot this year, I’ve just been wearing a lot of boots because they’re more comfortable and I just wore a pair of dress shoes this week. I haven’t really worn dress shoes in a long time and they were just rubbing my feet.
“So I was trying to get them right and changed my cleats a couple times and got them figured out. But for any women in this room who have worn like high heels, like blisters can be a (major annoyance). Not fun to have but I mean it’s a blister, who cares?”
Decker appeared to be altogether alright with chalking up the occurrence to being a passerby concern.
