‘No Hard Feelings’ as Lewis Gets Ready to Face Jaguars

Marcedes Lewis learned of his release from the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2018 by seeing it on ESPN.

GREEN BAY, Wis. – After 12 seasons with the Jacksonville Jaguars, tight end Marcedes Lewis learned about his release in March 2018 in the same way as everyone else.

“I saw that I was being released on ESPN,” Lewis recalled on Friday. “At the same time I’m looking at ESPN, my agent is calling me.”

At the time, Lewis said he felt “disrespected” by the team that drafted him in the first round in 2006. The timing was terrible. The Jaguars, who had exercised the option on his contract a month earlier, released him a week into free agency.

“I didn’t want to hear it from [agent Bus Cook] first,” Lewis said. “I’d rather them hit me up and at least give me the option whether to take a pay cut or whatever. At least just have a conversation, and we never got to that point. Just like anybody, you feel a certain way if that had happened to you. So, yeah, it took a little while. I didn’t understand it for a long time. But yeah, nothing to where I was losing sleep, but it was just like, ‘All right, oh well, this is the nature of the business.’”

It took a couple months but Lewis landed on his feet with the Packers. Year 1 with the Packers, when he was practically forgotten by then-coach Mike McCarthy, went about as well as the ending to his time in Jacksonville. However, having hired Matt LaFleur as coach, general manager Brian Gutekunst promised Lewis that Year 2 in Green Bay would be different.

It was. Lewis went from 190 snaps in 2018 to 487 in 2019. LaFleur gave Lewis a role, and Lewis embraced it with all of his energy. Rejuvenated by his importance on the roster and his relationships with quarterback Aaron Rodgers, offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and tight ends coach Justin Outten, Lewis re-signed with the Packers again this past offseason.

On Friday, Lewis said it took him a “good year” to get over the resentment of how his career in Jacksonville ended. So, when the Packers host the Jaguars on Sunday, he said he’ll have no ill will toward the team he helped lead to an AFC Championship Game in 2017.

“To be really honest with you, the thing that I miss the most about being there is the relationships that I made when I was there, and a lot of it is outside of football,” Lewis said. “Obviously, being there for 12 years, I had a routine, whether it be massage therapy, all the stuff I used to do outside of ball. Me and my barber that’s from Jacksonville are really good friends. Or even one of my good friends that’s a bartender for the Cheesecake Factory there. You know what I mean? I miss that aspect of it.

“As far as ball, obviously, it’s a business. It didn’t end the way that I would have expected it to end. I understand the business side of it but, at the same time, for somebody that was there for 12 years and always held the organization in high regard and never put myself in bad situations to make the organization look bad, I just felt it would have been cool to just do it the right way. I felt like we could have handled it different, but we definitely moved on, no hard feelings. I don’t have any of that energy. We’re preparing just like it’s another game. Just like I am every Sunday, I’m just excited to compete.”