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Giants Grant Osi Umenyiora Permission To Seek Trade

NEW YORK (WFAN) - Disgruntled defensive end Osi Umenyiora could soon be headed out of town. The Giants have given Umenyiora permission to seek a trade.

Umenyiora has his issues with Giants general manager Jerry Reese.

Coach Tom Coughlin revealed the lineman visited with Reese on Saturday to try to settle their impasse, but did not get specific. Whether they understood each other is unknown, but one report suggested Reese told Umenyiora another team would need to offer a first-round pick for the Giants to consider a trade. The same report also said Umenyiora would prefer to be shipped to Seattle. All the while, Coughlin and his players continued to detail how much Umenyiora is needed on their defense. Umenyiora has not issued any public comments

In an affidavit to be filed on July 18 by the NFLPA in their ongoing labor battle with league owners, Umenyiora claims that Reese never followed through on a two-year-old promise to re-tool his contract — or trade him to a franchise willing to do so, according to multiple reports.

"After about an hour of discussing my current contract, as well as the contracts of other defensive ends currently playing in the National Football League, Mr. Reese told me that two years from the start of the 2008 league year, if I was currently playing at a high level, we'd either renegotiate my current contract so that it would be equal to that of the top five defensive ends playing or I would be traded to a team that would do that," Umenyiora said in the affidavit, according to the New York Daily News.

"Before leaving the meeting, I asked Mr. Reese twice if he was absolutely sure that would be the case," he added. "He then told me that he was an honest and church-going man and that he would not lie, which I believed to be the case."

Umenyiora has had a few memorable spats with the Giants, most notably two seasons ago when he wondered whether he had played his final game with the team.

"It's an unbelievable situation, man," he said in December 2009. "Last game at Giants Stadium, probably as a Giant, just the way everything has unfolded has been unbelievable."

Umenyiora, 29, had 11.5 sacks in 2010 and set an NFL record with 10 forced fumbles.

It looks like Umenyiora is on his way out? Can the Giants find a replacement?

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