Cris Carter Blasts Sidney Rice for Skipping Larry Fitzgerald’s Camp

Last year Sidney Rice attended Larry Fitzgerald‘s off-season wide receiver camp, which featured should-be-Hall-of-Famer Cris Carter as an instructor.

The result? A Pro Bowl season for Sidney Rice.

The receiver was quick to credit the camp – along with Brett Favre – for his emergence as a top offensive weapon. But despite the apparent benefits Rice received by attending the camp, this summer he elected to skip it.

And this is not sitting well with professor Cris Carter, who thinks Rice needed to follow up his break-out year with another off-season of intensive work.

Carter, when asked by reporters why Rice would miss the camp after speaking so glowingly of its impact on his play, said:

"I don’t know. You have to ask him. I don’t know what it’s like to have one good year and then disappear. I don’t know what it’s like. That’s on him. I really don’t know. … If I had that kind of impact on him he should have been here today."

So Carter seems irked by Rice’s absence, and seems to suggest that Rice isn’t committed to continuing his improvement.

Of course, Carter’s main agenda here is to make Cris Carter look good. Cris wants to take at least partial credit for Rice’s improvement last year, and slamming Rice for not partaking of the camp this year is his way of doing that.

If Rice comes out in 2010 and stinks up the joint, we’ll look back on Carter’s remarks as grimly prophetic. But if Rice once again puts up Pro Bowl numbers?

Then I guess we’ll know that Brett Favre, and not Cris Carter, deserves the majority of the credit for making Rice a top-of-the-line receiver.