Landon Collins isn’t letting the small victories in a winless season so far go unnoticed.
The Giants standout defenseman asserted his dominance on Twitter Wednesday after Lions tight end Eric Ebron called him a “little punk of a safety” after the two exchanged barbs during Monday night’s game.
“Be a bully…,” Collins wrote on Twitter in response to an article on Ebron’s comments. “Still zero catches on me between those lines (100 emoji).”
Collins and Ebron got in each other’s faces after Ebron caught a touchdown in the second quarter of the Lions’ 24-10 win and tossed the ball up high in celebration. The Newark, N.J. native, who was playing in front of friends and family at MetLife Stadium, admitted after the game he did it in retaliation for the way Collins gloated over tackling him a series earlier.
“I was pissed off,” Ebron told the Detroit News on Tuesday. “I was pissed off at that little punk of a safety they’ve got over there.”
In the heat of the game, tied at seven near the start of the second quarter, Collins drilled Ebron into the ground and stomped down the field in celebration after Ebron caught a tipped pass from Matthew Stafford.
Getting the last laugh in the game — leading the Lions with five catches for 42 yards and taking home the ‘W’ — wasn’t enough for the 24-year-old Ebron, who responded to Collins’ tweet with another jab at the 2016 Pro Bowler.
“Lol… twitter fingers,” Ebron wrote. “The honey badger was better,” he added, referring to the college nickname of the Cardinals’ Tyrann Mathieu, who was a finalist for the Heisman Trophy as a cornerback while at LSU before Arizona drafted him in the third round in 2013. Collins went to Alabama.
There doesn’t appear to be much reason behind Ebron’s Collins-Mathieu comparison besides the two sharing a career course as elite college defensive backs from the SEC who have each made it to the Pro Bowl in the NFL. But Collins wasn’t belaboring the semantics.
“I’m weak lol I’m a punk tho…cuz I hit you to hard now…,” Collins tweeted back. “This is football…#lockdown.”
Whatever Ebron’s underlying meaning behind the playful insult, the University of North Carolina product still thinks highly of the Giants star.
“Collins, he played a good game, that hit just pissed me off and I didn’t feel like celebrating,” Ebron told the newspaper. “I wasn’t in that kind of joyful mood. It was still a good game. He played his butt off trying to guard me. I commend him for that.”