Star quarterback Joe Burrow made it perfectly clear earlier this week how respected Ted Karras is in the Cincinnati Bengals' locker room.
And the New England Patriots sure have a lot of love still for their former teammate.
Even after a crushing 22-18 defeat to the Bengals at Gillette Stadium on Saturday, several players on the Patriots made sure to make their way over to Karras during postgame handshakes. Jahlani Tavai, David Andrews, James Ferentz and Matthew Judon all were spotted re-connecting with Karras, as seen on video via NBC Sports Boston.
There's definitely plenty of mutual respect between Karras and the Patriots players he saw after the game. It even looked like Karras and Judon were trying to orchestrate a jersey exchange.
"I'm going to send mine. Can you send yours?" Karras said while pointing to the jerseys. "I'm going to send mine over."
Karras also told Judon "you're a (expletive) beast" during their postgame interaction. The Patriots edge rusher, who earned Pro Bowl honors this week, took down Burrow once as he now has 15 1/2 sacks on the season.
Karras, who was drafted by the Patriots in the sixth round of the 2016 NFL Draft, spent five of his first six seasons in the league with New England. He has been on the other side of facing the Patriots before when he started 16 games for the Miami Dolphins in 2020.
And after playing 77 career regular-season games with the Patriots, Karras understands it's not easy walking out of Gillette Stadium as a visitor with a win.
"There's two and a half decades of precedent where they win that game," Karras told reporters, per team-provided transcript. "Very dangerous and very scary. Very glad we got the win. It's my first win as a visitor here in Gillette. We could see them again. They're a very dangerous team that is well coached, well prepared and plays really hard. That was a gritty win and we made it way harder on ourselves than we needed to."
