Jones-Drew holdout expected to last into regular season

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Well, at least Maurice Jones-Drew won’t have to put up with replacement officials.

Earlier today, owner Shahid Khan chided the holdout tailback, saying that the “[t]rain is leaving the station” and that he should “[r]un, get on it.”  Though Jones-Drew still has had nothing to say about the situation, Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that the holdout is expected to last into the regular season.

So Khan apparently has his answer.

If Jones-Drew shows up before the Tuesday after Week 10, he can finish out the season and get credit for the year of service under his contract.  If he doesn’t report by the Tuesday after Week 10, he can’t play for the Jags or anyone in 2012, and his contract would kick over to 2013, keeping him signed for two more seasons.

The Jaguars are facing little pressure to cave, and Khan recently has said that, on a scale of one to 10, Jones-Drew’s absence doesn’t even move the needle.

With the parties dug in and no discernible middle ground, this one will continue until someone blinks.

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On a freezing cold night in Chicago, the Bears offense was on fire.

Chicago scored on all eight of their offensive possessions on the night (except for a kneel down on their final possession) in cruising to a 45-28 victory over the Dallas Cowboys. Chicago didn’t benefit from remarkable field position either. Each one of the Bears drives started on their own side of the 50-yard line.

A beleaguered Cowboys defense appeared to be functionally frozen in place all night as they proved to have little chance of slowing the Bears attack.

Josh McCown threw for 348 yards and four touchdowns and ran for another on the night. Matt Forte also ran for 102 yards on 20 carries as the Cowboys defense continued their struggles. Sean Lee returned for his first game in a month but left the game early after suffering a neck injury.

Tony Romo threw three touchdowns but was held to just 104 yards passing and 11 completions by the Bears. Dallas ran for 198 yards against a poor Chicago run defense, but the Cowboys just couldn’t keep up with a team that was scoring every time they touched the ball.

The NFC North playoff picture is now as murky as ever. Chicago moves to 7-6 and into a tie with the Detroit Lions at the top of the division, though the Lions hold the tiebreaker with two wins over the Bears. The Green Bay Packers remain just a half game behind with Aaron Rodgers getting closer to returning to the field.

Dallas now falls a game behind the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC East.

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Sean Lee’s return to the lineup for the Dallas Cowboys ultimately proved to be somewhat short-lived.

Lee left Monday night’s game against the Chicago Bears with a neck injury. While attempting to make a tackle, Lee dove forward and took a knee/thigh to the head.

Lee was making his return to the lineup for the first time in nearly a month. Lee missed the last two games for Dallas after suffering a hamstring injury against the New Orleans Saints on Nov. 10. Lee had racked up seven tackles for the Cowboys on the night before leaving the game.

Lee’s absence levies a further blow to an already maligned Cowboys’ defense. The Bears have scored on each of their first seven possessions against Dallas in building a 42-14 lead.

AP

Alshon Jeffery has shown a penchant for making difficult, contested catches in becoming a reliable weapon for the Chicago Bears in his second season with the team.

Monday night against the Dallas Cowboys is proving to be no exception.

With 17 seconds left in the first half and the Bears holding a 17-14 lead, Josh McCown took a shot at throwing to a fairly well-covered Jeffery in the end zone. Jeffery was being trailed by cornerback B.W. Webb and had safety Jeff Heath tracking over the top as well.

McCown placed the ball perfectly in the back corner of the end zone but it still required a stellar catch from Jeffery. He leaped above the coverage of Webb to snag the ball out of the sky and managed to get both feet down in the corner of the end zone while falling backward out-of-bounds for a 25-yard touchdown grab.

Jeffery already has five catches for 84 yards and a touchdown against a shaky Bears defense. The touchdown was his third in the last two games after exploding for 249 yards on 12 catches and two scores against the Minnesota Vikings last week.

The touchdown gave Chicago a 24-14 lead at the break with the Bears getting the ball to begin the second half.

AP

It’s a cold Monday night in Chicago, but both offenses are heating up.

Dallas got the game started with a 12-play, 75-yard drive that included some big running by DeMarco Murray and ended with a two-yard touchdown pass from Tony Romo to Dez Bryant. It was a great drive that looked like it was going to start a long night for the Bears.

But Chicago’s offense came right back with a 12-play drive of its own, covering 78 yards and culminating with a four-yard touchdown pass from Josh McCown to Earl Bennett.

And after holding the Cowboys’ offense, the Bears got the ball again and marched down the field on a 10-play, 65-yard drive that ended with McCown leaping into the end zone at the end of a seven-yard run.

Much like we saw on Sunday, there’s a lot of good football being played in the cold.

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As the NFL ponders whether to export the replay function from stadiums to a central location such as the league office, Sunday’s bungling of a Bengals touchdown call provides the best evidence that change is needed.

With less than two minutes remaining in the first half, Cincinnati running back BenJarvus Green-Ellis hit the ground short of the goal line and then skidded across.  Ruled not a touchdown on the field, the replay assistant activated the replay function by buzzing referee Jeff Triplette.

The question then became whether indisputable visual evidence existed to overrule the on-field decision that Green-Ellis was down.  Triplette, who presided over the Week 13 Sunday night first-down clusterfudge in Washington, determined that the call on the field was wrong.

Triplette’s decision seemed to ignore the possibility that Green-Ellis was tripped up in the backfield by a Colts player, causing Green-Ellis to stumble and ultimately fall.  As it turns out, Triplette’s decision did ignore that possibility; Triplette said after the game that he looked only at the end of the play.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told Tom Pelissero of USA Today that Triplette had the authority to review the entire play.  Triplette, however, admitted to a pool reporter after the game that Triplette didn’t.

“It was a judgment call,” Aiello explained to Pelissero.  “Jeff determined in the review that the runner was not down by contact.”

But that’s not the standard. The question is whether Triplette detected indisputable visual evidence that Green-Ellis wasn’t tripped up or otherwise touched by a defender on the way to the ground.  Triplette necessarily failed to apply that standard because he didn’t even consider the visual evidence regarding the events that caused Green-Ellis to stumble and fall.

It’s easy to see why Triplette erred.  Efforts to make a detached, clinical assessment of film becomes difficult if not impossible for officials who are attached to the playing field; a voting-booth curtain hardly transports the official to an environment that is conducive to a proper assessment of the video.  These review need to be conducted in a place where reliable, consistent, and efficient decisions can be made by specialists who are sensitive to the applicable standard and in turn equipped to overturn only those rulings that are clearly incorrect.

Triplette’s mistake proves once again that the current system isn’t working.  With replay mistakes being the easiest officiating gaffes for casual fans to identify and criticize, the NFL needs to find a better way to implement the replay system.

Taking it out of the stadiums and sending it to New York is the best way to do that.

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Late in Sunday’s Seahawks-49ers game, San Francisco, trailing 17-16, marched deep into Seattle territory. The 49ers were able to run six plays, force the Seahawks to use their remaining timeouts, run two minutes off the clock, and finally kick the winning field goal with 26 seconds left.

That raises an interesting question: Should the Seahawks have allowed the 49ers to score a touchdown as soon as they got into field goal range? That would have meant the Seahawks would need a touchdown, not just a field goal, to come back and win. But it also would have given the Seahawks a lot more time to score.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said that question occurred to him at the time, and he briefly discussed it with his assistants. But Carroll said it was his gut feeling that he doesn’t believe in allowing opposing teams to score.

“There’s a lot of gut in that decision,” Carroll said on 710 ESPN. “We had the talk, and it’s just not in our mentality to let anybody have anything.”

Still, Carroll said he’s going to look into whether it might have been beneficial for the Seahawks to let the 49ers score.

“I’m going to do a little research this week and see if anyone has ever done that and won,” Carroll said.

There have been high-profile instances of teams allowing opponents to score touchdowns, including the Patriots allowing the Giants to score late in Super Bowl XLVI and the Packers allowing the Broncos to score late in Super Bowl XXXII. In those cases, however, the tactic didn’t result in a dramatic come-from-behind win. And unless Carroll can find a prior example of a team actually winning after letting the other team score, he doesn’t sound interested in conceding a touchdown to an opposing team.

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Rob Gronkowski isn’t the only NFL tight end to have his knee blown out by a low hit this year. And one of the other victims of a low hit wants the NFL to do something about it.

Dustin Keller, the Miami tight end whose season ended before it began when he took a low hit in the preseason, took to Twitter today to express his concern for Gronkowski and to say it’s time for the NFL to do something about players getting hit in the knees.

Praying for @RobGronkowski and a speedy recovery and a MAJOR comeback..something has to be done about these low hits!!!

—
Dustin Keller (@DUSTINKELLER81) December 09, 2013

The player who hit Keller and caused him to miss the entire season was Texans rookie safety D.J. Swearinger, who said at the time that it had been impressed upon him not to hit high, even though he personally would rather take a hit to the head than to the knee.

“I was making a hit playing football,” Swearinger said after the hit on Keller. “In this league you’ve got to go low. If you go high you’re going to get a fine. . . .The rules say you can’t hit high so I went low and I’m sorry that happened. I would think you’d rather have more concussions than leg injuries. Leg injury, you can’t come back from that. A concussion, you be back in a couple in a couple of weeks.”

The NFL, however, wants players to stop thinking of concussions as injuries that are easy to brush off. And if the NFL’s player safety rules mean players are lowering their targets, that’s exactly what the NFL wants.

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It’s common for NFL head coaches to contact the league office when they have a complaint about the officiating. It’s less common for the league office to reach out to coaches about the officiating.

But Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier said today that the league called him about the officiating in Sunday’s loss to the Ravens.

“The fact that they called should give you an indication of how they felt about things on that day. That was encouraging that they wanted to talk about that game from yesterday,” Frazier said, via 1500ESPN.com.

Frazier said he didn’t want to go into all the details about what was said in that conversation, but he did acknowledge the obvious: The Vikings weren’t happy about the officials’ ruling on Toby Gerhart’s fumble, which was upheld on replay even though the video showed that Gerhart’s knee was down.

“We did talk about the Gerhart play,” Frazier said.

The Vikings were also unhappy about the way pass interference was inconsistently called on Sunday, with those inconsistencies seeming to benefit from the Ravens. It’s a little surprising that the league office would reach out to Frazier, but it’s not surprising at all that there were more plenty of bad calls on Sunday, because this NFL season has been full of them.

AP

The Patriots have officially ended tight end Rob Gronkowski’s season.

The team announced that Gronkowski has been placed on injured reserve after tearing his ACL and MCL on a shot to the knee by Browns safety T.J. Ward during Sunday’s 27-26 Patriots win. Gronkowski, who also suffered a concussion on the play, is likely going to be impacted for much of the 2014 offseason as well as he tries to work himself back to full health for the second straight year.

New England also announced that tight end D.J. Williams has been re-signed to the active roster. Williams played in the Week 13 victory over the Texans, but was released last week when Michael Hoomanawanui returned to the lineup. Williams also played seven games for the Jaguars earlier this season.

Williams is on the roster, but he isn’t filling Gronkowski’s shoes. No one’s going to be able to do that, as we saw during the first chunk of this season while Gronkowski recovered from back and forearm surgery. The Patriots will have to improvise and do it quickly in order to keep their offense humming with Gronkowski out of action.

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The Sunday that the NFL became a snow globe is starting to recede from view, but we’re not quite ready to give up on one of the more memorable days of regular season action in many years.

We’ll be covering all of the fallout from the day’s games on Monday’s edition of Pro Football Talk on NBCSN. Rodney Harrison and Scott Pioli will be on hand to help break down the 49ers defending their home turf, the Redskins ceding theirs to the Chiefs in a rout and everything that happened on snowy fields around the league.

We’ve got all the biggest news from Monday as well as we catch you up on everything you need to know in the NFL. We’ll also take a look ahead to Monday night’s matchup between the Bears and Cowboys from Chicago.

It all gets started at 5:30 p.m. ET on NBCSN.

AP

The Raiders found playing time for both of their quarterbacks on Sunday, using Terrelle Pryor for one first half drive while letting Matt McGloin steer the ship for the rest of the game.

It sounds like they’ll continue to use the same kind of arrangement against the Chiefs in Week 15. Henry Wofford of CSN Bay Area reports that Raiders coach Dennis Allen said Monday that McGloin would start next weekend and that the team would make a plan for “when they can use” Pryor on offense.

McGloin said after Sunday’s loss to the Jets that it was difficult coming out of the game when Pryor entered, although he said it didn’t excuse his poor performance. McGloin played better in the second half, leading the Raiders to 24 points that kept the game in some doubt into the fourth quarter. He finished the day 18-of-31 for 245 yards, two touchdowns and an interception. Pryor led the Raiders to a field goal on his only series.

Whatever other evaluations the Raiders make about their two quarterbacks in the next three weeks, the one that counts the most should have already been made. The Raiders have to be open to other options at quarterback because neither McGloin nor Pryor has cemented himself as the guy for the future.

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Soon-to-be first-round NFL draft pick Jadeveon Clowney has already drawn comparisons to some of the game’s great defensive ends.

Specifically, the South Carolina junior who is expected to declare is doing his best to emulate Mario Williams lately.

According to WIS-TV in Columbia, S.C., Clowney was pulled over Saturday night by the South Carolina Highway Patrol and cited for doing 110 mph in a 70 mph zone in his Chrysler 300.

It’s a dangerous and silly thing to do, and not just because he could put himself and others in peril.

NFL evaluators are going to be going over Clowney’s personnel file closely after his production dipped this season, so he shouldn’t give them any reason to downgrade his stock, which will only serve to take more money out of his pocket.

AP

Ravens receiver Brandon Stokley suffered another concussion on Sunday, at least the 14th of his football career.

Stokley said after suffering a concussion at the end of the 2010 season that he had suffered more than a dozen concussions in high school, college and the NFL. Today Ravens coach John Harbaugh confirmed that Stokley suffered another one.

Like all NFL players, Stokley will have to go through the league’s protocol and get cleared by a doctor before he will be permitted to practice or play. Some would say Stokley shouldn’t play at all, and that at age 36 he ought to call it a career.

Stokley, however, has said every time the subject of concussions comes up that he loves football too much to walk away. He’ll keep playing as long as he can, even if the concussions continue.

AP

The Packers got the win they needed to stay in the playoff hunt on Sunday, but they still don’t know if they’ll have they’ll have Aaron Rodgers back in the lineup.

Coach Mike McCarthy said Monday that Rodgers still hasn’t been medically cleared to return from the broken left collarbone that has kept him out for the last five games. That’s where things were last week as well, so there won’t be any update to his status until he visits with doctors.

That will come on Wednesday morning after Rodgers is evaluated. Rodgers was able to get on the practice field last week, McCarthy said he felt better Friday than he did on Wednesday, so a green light on the medical side is likely all that needs to happen for Rodgers to start in Week 15. Matt Flynn was 24-of-32 for 258 yards, a touchdown and an interception in Sunday’s win.

McCarthy also said that running back Eddie Lacy has a sprained ankle and that it is too early to say whether he’ll be able to play next weekend. Lacy was able to finish the game after getting hurt just before halftime.

AP

The snowy field in Philadelphia claimed a victim before the game even started on Sunday when Lions running back Reggie Bush aggravated his calf injury while warming up before the game against the Eagles.

Bush didn’t play in the game as a result, leaving the Lions a little short at running back because they had already handed in their inactive list when Bush tweaked his calf. Coach Jim Schwartz termed Bush day-to-day on Monday, saying, via the Detroit Free Press, that it was too early to know if he’ll be able to play in Week 15 against the Ravens. The same is true for defensive end Ziggy Ansah, who hurt his shoulder, and right tackle LaAdrian Waddle, who hurt his elbow.

“We’ll just have to see this week how they respond. It’s a big game, it’s a home game,” Schwartz said. “Obviously, we’re three games left in the year, we’re at the top of our division, so every game is pretty critical, so I’m pretty sure those guys will do everything they can to get back on the field. But if they can’t go, we’ll have the next guy behind them ready to play.”

Schwartz also said cornerback Darius Slay had arthroscopic knee surgery, but the team has no plans to place him on injured reserve.