Cornerbacks and Crabtree a toxic mix

Michael Crabtree rubs cornerbacks the wrong way.

I’m not sure why that is. His ability to irritate opposing defensive backs seems completely out of balance with his impact on the field.

Sure, Crabtree is a good receiver. But he isn’t Julio Jones or Antonio Brown.

Yet he manages to get the opposition more worked up than just about any receiver. They want to bully him.

When he was in a 49ers uniform, Crabtree got under Richard Sherman’s skin. In Sherman’s famous rant on live television after the 2014 NFC Championship Game win, he called Crabtree a “sorry-ass receiver.” Afterward, he wrote a first-person essay about the incident.

“As far as Crabtree being a top-20 NFL receiver, you’d have a hard time making that argument to me,” Sherman wrote on SI.com. “… But that’s not why I don’t like the man. It goes back to something he said to me this offseason in Arizona, but you’d have to ask him about that. A lot of what I said ... was adrenaline talking, and some of that was Crabtree. I just don’t like him.”

This season, Josh Norman went after Crabtree, ripping him after the Sunday night game in Washington when the Raiders’ offense was shut down. Norman said Crabtree had predicted he would have a big game.

“Sherm was right,” Norman said. “He said (Crabtree’s) sorry, but I don’t think he’s sorry. He sucked to be honest with you.”

Then on Sunday, Aqib Talib renewed his feud with Crabtree, ripping off his gold chain for the second straight season. In January, Talib said:

“He just been wearing that chain all year, man, it’s just been growing on me. I said if he wears that chain in front of me, I’m going to snatch it off.”

From my experiences covering him for his entire NFL career, both with the 49ers and Raiders, Crabtree seems relatively innocuous. He doesn’t speak much to the media, but apparently talks in a way that players on the other team hear loud and clear. In a land of alpha males, something about Crabtree triggers the opposition.

Crabtree won’t make anyone mad this Sunday. He’s suspended for the game, and the Giants aren’t the bullying kind. But when he gets back on the field against Kansas City, watch out.

Marcus Peters is another cornerback who doesn’t much like Crabtree.