What Giants’ John Harbaugh said about Jaxson Dart, Abdul Carter, Trump controversy

Giants coach John Harbaugh spoke with the media on Friday.

The topic of the day, of course: The fallout from Jaxson Dart’s appearance with President Donald Trump, Abdul Carter’s public objection and a team meeting to discuss it all.

Here’s the bulk of what Harbaugh had to say (full transcript here):

It’s all good questions, and it’s interesting stuff. I think it’s part of the conversation of life. We’re part of that, too, as a football team, like any workplace.

It was a great opportunity. It was really a good opportunity for us as a football team to have these kind of conversations around a real life incident, something that comes up.

It’s one thing to talk about it in theory, to say, I want to handle this, that or the other, and we do. But when you have something that happens that’s real because things are going to happen that are real, you get a chance to talk about them practically.

That was the best part about it. We had a chance to talk to the guys a little bit through the weekend, then we got in first thing Tuesday because that was our first chance back together. We didn’t want to let it sit. The veterans came in and we had a really good conversation with those guys.

We went into a team meeting, and really the important thing to understand is that we are — what we are is a collection of all of us together. So we need to understand really how we want to approach these things going forward.

You don’t want to stand up there and just try to dictate some terms as a coach. You want to find out what the players think, how the coaches and players feel about it, and really mainly the players because, as I told them, it’s your team. What you want the focus to be on and what you want to be about going forward and the way we’re going to treat one another going forward, is it going to be centered around respect and those kind of things, that’s really up to you guys as a team. You guys need to decide and then let’s talk about it and let’s decide what we’re going to do.

We had a good little meeting. It wasn’t real long but it was to the point, and the players established amongst themselves how they wanted to approach these kind of things. They’re part of the dialogue in our society. They did a great job. I was proud of them. I was impressed by them. Couldn’t have asked for anything better.

So we’re in a good place now, and we’re moving forward.

Also of note: Harbaugh said he knew Dart was going to meet Trump at the rally beforehand, but suggested he did not know he would be on the stage introducing the president.