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Maurice Jones-Drew Is Pissed Off, And That's Good For The Jaguars

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Jacksonville Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew held a press conference on Sunday afternoon to discuss his holdout and notify everyone that it was ending, as he reported to the team. Jones-Drew came off as upset and angry he wasn't able to get a new deal done.

Maurice Jones-Drew is pissed off, and that is an extremely good thing for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Maurice Jones-Drew is a very prideful person, and if you couldn't tell from his press conference, he takes everything said and written about him and uses it as fuel. When Jones-Drew was drafted in the second-round of the 2006 NFL Draft, he decided to wear the number 32 to remind him constantly of how many teams passed on him in the first round.

"I think I play with a lot of chips already. I think one more wouldn’t bother me, but like I said there’s no hard feelings," Jones-Drew said on Sunday. "I don’t want anyone to think that I hate someone or I am going to play to spite something."

In Jones-Drew's press conference on Sunday, he didn't take the typical cliched response approach that most players take when they return from a holdout and don't get what they wanted. Jones-Drew instead was a bit combative and clearly salty, making it known he'd read everything written about him.

"Yeah well Vito (Stellino) if I listened to what everybody told me I wasn’t going to do you think I’d be here right now? Because you told me I wasn’t going to be here," Jones-Drew barked when he was asked why he held out as long as he did if he knew he wouldn't get a new deal. "A lot of guys told me I wasn’t going to make it. I knew it was going to be difficult.

"Let me put it this way I knew it was going to be a difficult situation. I had two years left. I understood that. I understood the whole point of it, but the way I was raised, the way I was grown is if you believe something you fight for it and that’s for everybody, you fight for whatever you believe," Jones-Drew said. "My production stated something, I fought for it. Plain and simple. So, yes it went into a holdout and yes it went into all these different things, reports being written, all that. At the end of the day that’s what it was about, my production and my value. Simple as that."

Jones-Drew clearly is the type of player who takes anything negative and spins it into fuel, fuel that motivates him to be one of the best running backs in the game right now. The latest situation is just going to cause Jones-Drew to come out and play harder than he has ever before, because now he clearly seems as if feels slighted, as he did on draft day when all 32 teams passed on him.

Jones-Drew is going to come out and prove on the field that he should have gotten a new deal, and that's something Jaguars fans should be very excited about.

"I haven't stopped fighting," Jones-Drew said. "I'm going to come out here and play."