There’s no love lost between Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and his old teammate AJ Brown. Now being held to the highest standard with the New England Patriots, AJ Brown has spent this offseason putting in the work to establish himself as a trusted target for quarterback Drake Maye. But through it all, a former player who has experienced the cultures of both these locker rooms, Asante Samuel, believes that Brown is throwing shade at Hurts every single chance he gets.

“I feel like most of AJ Brown’s focus during his interviews these days – Do we all feel this way?” Samuel asked on his Say What Needs To Be Said podcast. “I feel like his focus during his interviews is taking shots at Jalen Hurts. Now, I could be wrong, but I feel that he is intentionally saying things about his current quarterback to make Jalen Hurts feel it. I could be wrong.”

Samuel then pulls up an interview clip as a receipt. When the interviewer asks Brown how it has been sharing adjoining lockers with his QB. Brown, pointing to Drake sitting next to him, goes on to praise the third-year quarterback for his locker room leadership.

“It’s been great,” Brown said. “He’s made my job a lot easier. He’s such a great guy, and he always takes the blame for any little thing, and I’m like, ‘Drake, it’s okay. Like, it’s not that deep, you know?’ But he’s incredible, man. He’s fun to play with, and I can’t wait.”

After Drake also showers Brown with praise in that interview, Samuel goes to Brown’s comments and makes his point again. This time, even adds what a great fit Brown has been in New England.

“You know, it just feels like he’s always taking a shot at Jalen Hurts for some reason,” Samuel said. “Somehow, someway, he has Jalen Hurts in the back of his mind. But we could be wrong, you know?

“But what a difference a year makes, man. What a difference a year can do for some people. But I knew when the Patriots signed [Mike] Vrabel, he would be the perfect fit. And he would be the person that vouches for AJ Brown. If he gets AJ Brown, he will be the one responsible for making sure AJ Brown is doing what he’s supposed to do.”

Now, Mike Vrabel has been calling AJ Brown out since the first day of training camp – in meeting rooms and on the practice field. Brown, for his part, is loving the grind under the coach who once drafted him to the Tennessee Titans. But even with all of this, the Hurts narrative hasn’t gone away.

Just a day after Brown was traded to the Patriots, he sat down with sportscaster Maria Taylor for an interview and said he and Hurts are “not as close as we once were.” Brown then went on to explain what happened – or didn’t – near the end of his stint in Philly.

“Nothing happened, people just grow apart,” Brown said. “Nothing happened between me and him, or our families, wives, anything. Nothing like that ever happened. Life happens and you just look up sometimes and you just, you find yourself drifting away and that’s fine. And I think both parties accepted that.”

As for Jalen Hurts, he recently sat for an exclusive interview with Zach Baron of GQ Sports, where Baron called Hurts “the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback” right in the headline. In the interview, Baron posed a few questions to Hurts about Brown, and every time, the quarterback chose to field the question instead of addressing it head-on.

“Hurts has a vague answer to my questions about Brown– ‘You can’t replace the greatness that we have achieved and the presence and the success that he’s had on the field, but we’ve got to go to work’ – and, when pressed a bit, a slightly more nuanced answer,” writes Baron. “‘It’s a game where we’ve all got to have a shared mission,’ he says, when I ask what happened that things got to the point where Brown reportedly wanted to be traded. ‘We all got to be in pursuit of the collective. And it’s not something I can speak on from his behalf, but I can tell you my focus has always been to pursue the mission.’”

When Baron pulled up Brown’s comments about the two having grown apart, Hurts just had a one-word response to it: “Clearly.”

Hurts is still the godfather to AJ’s daughter, Jersee. But after all the frustration Brown made public last year in Philly, and after all the questions Hurts fielded in light of those frustrations, clearly, the two really have grown apart. In light of this relationship turning sour, one can understand why Asante Samuel feels like every time Brown talks about his new QB, he’s also reminiscing about a time when he was Hurts’ primary target.