Did Sean Salisbury Make An Awful Verbal Slip? (UPDATE: ESPN Says No.)

We have been extremely hesitant to post this, because even though we're not fans of Sean Salisbury as an analyst — or as an exhibitionist , for that matter — we've never thought of him as a sinister person, or, say, an anti-Semite. (We're not sure we do now, actually, and we also understand he's going through a difficult private time.) But, in the interest of setting the record, straight, even though we haven't been able to find the clip from yesterday's "NFL Live" program, we've received countless emails claiming that Salisbury made an extremely questionable remark about Peyton Manning and his successful "Jewing" of the Patriots. We still weren't going to run with it, because, as we said, we haven't seen the actual program, and no one has been able to dig up a clip for us. But now it's showing up on other sites, and message boards everywhere, so we simply link to what they're saying, and let you draw your own conclusions until a clip surfaces.

Describing Peyton Manning's calmness in the second half: "No need to panic. We'll nip. We'll tuck. We'll go. We'll crunch. We'll Jew. We'll do it all and they nickel and dimed them and Peyton made the play when it mattered."

If a clip shows that Salisbury didn't make the comment — and it still seems awfully unlikely to us, frankly — we'll be ecstatic to point everyone in that direction. But it's all over the Web right now, and we felt the best way to handle it was to solicit a clip. So, this is that solicitation.

Something To Think About While Watching Sean Salisbury [Deadspin]

(UPDATE: Michael Rand over at Randball gets calls returned from ESPN, and they've released a statement on this.

Their official statement is that Salisbury said "Chew," not "Jew." That sounds potentially reasonable ... but we still have no video.)