Richard Sherman among 49ers defending suspended announcer Tim Ryan's comment on Lamar Jackson's skin tone

“He’s really good at that fake, Lamar Jackson. But when you consider his dark skin with a dark football with a dark uniform, you could not see that thing,” Ryan said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I mean you literally could not see when he was in and out of the mesh point, and if you’re a half step slow on him in terms of your vision forget about it. He’s out of the gate.”

“I know Tim personally, and I listened to the dialogue and saw it written, and honestly I wasn’t as outraged as everybody else," Sherman said. "I understand how it can be taken under a certain context and be offensive to some. But if you're saying, this is a brown ball, they're wearing dark colors and he has a brown arm, honestly, sometimes we were having trouble seeing it on film.

“He's making a play fake, and sometimes he's swinging his arm real fast, and you're like, Ok, does he have the ball? And you look up and [Mark] Ingram is running it. So it was technically a valid point, but you can always phrase things better. You can always phrase things and not say ‘his black skin.’ ”

“100 percent it’s an issue,” Sherman said of defenders having difficulty locating the ball when playing against Jackson. “What he presented — that’s why it wasn’t that offensive. Because what he was saying was a great point.”

“He walked up to me earlier, and before he even said anything, I told him ‘I’ve got your back,’” Ford said. “I already knew the story — words kinda got taken out of context. Of course — I think he knows now he could have used better judgment with his words.

“But we’ve got his back. I knew what he was trying to say. This era we live in. It’s just what it is.”

“There’s not one type of bone — you know the bone I’m talking about — in his body,” Ford said. “So put that to bed really fast.”