Wentz shocked by critical report, admits he could be better teammate

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz denied multiple details from a January report that criticized him for "selfish" and "egotistical" behavior, but he acknowledged his role in the perception that he's not the best teammate.

"I know who I am, first of all. I know how I carry myself. I know I'm not perfect. I know I have flaws," he said recently, according to ESPN's Tim McManus. "So I'm not going to sit here and say it was inaccurate and completely made up. I'm not going to do that. But at the end of the day, I will say our locker room is really close. If there were guys that had issues, in hindsight, I wish we could have just talked about them. But, again, I don't know how that all happened and everything with that."

The initial report cited multiple anonymous players and other sources from the team who accused Wentz of favoritism and resisting concepts he considered to be "(Nick) Foles stuff."

Shortly after the report was made, Lane Johnson, Zach Ertz, and Fletcher Cox took to Wentz's defense on Twitter to say the quarterback is a great person and teammate, and the article was "fake news."

The 26-year-old will head into his fourth NFL season in 2019 after his last two campaigns were cut short by injury, resulting in Foles leading the team to a win in Super Bowl LII and a divisional-round loss in 2018.

Wentz refuted multiple details from the report, including that he was "once verbally attacked by a highly respected teammate for not being 'a team guy,'" and that he "bullied" first-year offensive coordinator Mike Groh.

He said the story took him by surprise but plans to learn from it and become a better leader.

"It's never fun to read, but to an extent, you look at it and be like, 'Well, if someone did have this perception of me, why? What have I done wrong? What can I get better at?'" he said. "I realize I have my shortcomings. Yes, I can be selfish. I think we all have selfishness inside of us. There's human elements to that, that I really look at and say, 'Well, I can get better.'"