Detroit Lions’ Taylor Decker reveals secret behind his sudden departure before Panthers game

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There’s the agony of defeat. And then there’s the agony of the feet.

Taylor Decker suffered both in Sunday’s 20-0 loss to the Carolina Panthers.

The Detroit Lions left tackle left pregame warmups early for an unknown reason, but he played every snap of offense without any apparent problem.

On Monday, Decker revealed the mystery behind his sudden departure from the field: Blisters caused 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 specific problem with the dress shoes was that Decker hadn’t worn them much recently.

“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 seemed entirely comfortable with chalking up the incident to being a pedestrian concern.

“It sounds silly,” he said with a sheepish grin, “but that’s what it was.”

Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.

This article was originally published by Freep.com. Read the original article here.