Buckeyes DT Hankins announces he’s entering draft

AP

Another college underclassman has opted to throw his hat in the ring for the NFL Draft.

And it’s a big hat.

Ohio State defensive tackle Johnathan Hankins announced he’ll give up his senior season to go pro, according to the Associated Press.

The All-Big Ten choice has started the last two seasons for the Buckeyes, finishing in the top five in tackles both seasons.

The 6-foot-3, 322-pounder had 138 tackles, 16.5 for a loss and 5.0 sacks in three years.

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The Dallas Cowboys defense took a thumping at the hands of the Chicago Bears on Monday night. A pair of Cowboys defenders also felt the beating in their wallets.

According to the Associated Press, defensive back Orlando Scandrick and defensive end George Selvie each were fined for the league for actions against the Bears in Monday night’s 45-28 loss.

Scandrick was fined $21,000 for a helmet-to-helmet hit with Chicago receiver Brandon Marshall. Selvie was hit for a hit below the knees of Bears’ quarterback Josh McCown – though he didn’t reveal the fine amount.

Selvie said he intended to appeal the fine.

AP

Bernard Pollard has racked up many fines this season for illegal hits. However, he won’t be getting fined for his hit against Denver Broncos receiver Eric Decker on Sunday.

According to Jim Wyatt and John Glennon of the Tennessean, Pollard said the NFL told him the officials had made a mistake in throwing a flag for an illegal hit against a defenseless receiver.

“They said the ref made a bad call,” Pollard said. “It doesn’t help us on Wednesday.”

Pollard hit Decker shoulder-to-shoulder on the play and was still flagged for an illegal hit. The play came early in the third quarter with the Titans still holding a 21-20 lead over the Broncos. The penalty gave the Broncos a first down at the Titans’ 42-yard line. Two passes to Demaryius Thomas later and the Broncos were in the end zone to take a 27-21 lead.

It was a lead the Broncos wouldn’t relinquish.

For a player that has been fined over $60,000 this season for illegal plays, Pollard believes referees aren’t getting enough scrutiny from the league for missed calls.

“If we make a bad decision in a competitive game when we don’t mean to, we are fined 50-plus thousand dollars and some guys $200,000 plus a game check plus suspensions,” Pollard said. “But refs are making bad calls and nothing is happening. … And it is messing our group up because we don’t know how to play now, as far as how we hit the receivers. It is tough as a defensive back.”

AP

The Dallas Cowboys will get a reinforcement back to help try to patch an ailing defensive unit.

According to the Associated Press, the Cowboys have activated defensive end Edgar Jones from the injured reserve list.

Jones was placed on the reserve/designated to return list in October after suffering an abdominal/groin injury. Jones appeared in the first four games of the season for Dallas after being acquired from Kansas City at the end of the preseason. Jones recorded five tackles and a pass defense in those four games.

Jones is eligible to play this week against the Green Bay Packers. The Cowboys’ defense is coming off another pathetic on Monday night. The Chicago Bears scored on all eight possessions and Josh McCown threw four touchdowns and ran in for another in handing the Cowboys a 45-28 defeat.

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Bears receiver Alshon Jeffery quickly has become a man among boys, using a six-foot, three-inch frame and arms that seem to belong to an even taller man to make acrobatic catches in traffic.

Jeffery’s performance and potential will surely make folks who passed on the former South Carolina wideout regret not putting his name on a card.

Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News points out that the Jets surely rue the decision to take receiver Stephen Hill over Jeffery.  Hill was the 43rd pick in the 2012 draft; Jeffery went two picks later.

Other teams that surely are muttering profanities when watching Jeffery’s sizable sizzle reel include the Rams (who took Brian Quick with the 33rd selection) and the 49ers (who selected A.J. Jenkins with pick 30).

Teams that drafted players at other positions likely are feeling remorse, including the team that used the 42nd overall pick.  On a tackle.  Named Jonathan Martin.

Between Jeffery and Brandon Marshall, it’s hard for the Bears to go wrong at the quarterback position.  Whether Jay Cutler or Josh McCown or Cade McNown, plenty of guys would look pretty good with Marshall and Jeffery running the routes and making difficult catches look routine.

AP

Seahawks receiver Percy Harvin continues to struggle with a hip problem that kept him out of action until Week 11, and that has kept him out of action since then.

Harvin didn’t practice on Wednesday in advance of a trip to New York to play the Giants, and coach Pete Carroll characterizes Harvin as week-to-week.

“We’re trying to figure this thing out and when he gets out on the practice field, then it’s truly day-to-day and we’ll see how he responds,” Carroll said, via quotes distributed by the team.  “So as of today, he’s not going.  He won’t be going, he’s rehabbing.  That means that he’s running in his rehab work and we have to see if he can tolerate it and come on back and give us a couple of days work.  We’ll have to make sure that he’s right.  So we’re going to take our time and I know it seems like, ‘How can you take your time when you’re this close to the end of the season?’  But we still have to do that to take care of him.”

Carroll explained that the hip has gotten better and gotten worse.

“It has fluctuated,” Carroll said.  “He has gone back and forth, where he’s gotten close and then it got aggravated a little bit.  Just hasn’t quite got over the hump where he’s really clear.  He has a whole lot of new movement in that hip that he hasn’t had before and he’s trying to become accustomed to that.”

The Seahawks have been fine without him.  They’ll be even better if/when he can play — even if the next time he plays is the next time the Seahawks play in MetLife Stadium.

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Mike Shanahan’s wide-ranging and at-times rambling Wednesday press conference included plenty of intriguing nuggets.  MDS has done a great job of distilling the most salient points.

There’s another point that relates back to the report that got this giant ball of dysfunction rolling.  Shanahan still hasn’t denied the ESPN bombshell that Shanahan nearly quit in January due to the relationship between owner Daniel Snyder and quarterback Robert Griffin III.

“What I said is there’s always bits and pieces of an article that are true,” Shanahan told reporters.  “I’m not going to go into detail what was true about the article.  I don’t think it’s fair to the organization and I would speak to that person first before I would speak to anybody else.  But when you get partial truths — and I’m not one to say somebody is lying or this isn’t reported correctly — but I’ve heard that my whole life. I think everybody in this room knows that I don’t talk to anybody off the record.”

If Shanahan truly doesn’t talk to anybody off the record, he’s the only person connected to the NFL in any significant capacity who doesn’t.

Everybody talks to somebody off the record.  With local and national media more prevalent and aggressive than ever, everyone knows someone they’ll talk to without attaching their name to it.

In this case, Shanahan or someone close to him was talking off the record to someone at ESPN.  The fact that Shanahan has failed to dispute the notion that he was ready to quit in January proves it.

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For more and more NFL teams, the time of the year has come to think about next year.

In a salary-cap environment, one of the biggest things about which to think is the spending limit.  Per multiple reports, league owners were told at Wednesday’s quarterly meeting that the salary cap for 2014 currently is expected to be $126.3 million per team.

That’s a $3.3 million increase from the current maximum, which translates to an increase of only 2.68 percent over last year.

The cap has grown slowly in recent years due in large part to unexpectedly high benefits costs.  Since the 2011 labor deal was finalized, accounting creativity has been needed in order to ensure an uptick in the cap.  In 2012, for example, a little pigskin-style robbing of Peter to pay Paul was needed to prevent the spending limit from actually dropping.

The cap is expected to continue to make slow, steady growth.  A larger bump is possible in 2015, the first year in which the calculations will take into account the new broadcast contracts, which start in 2014.

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John Madden, the Hall of Fame coach and longtime broadcaster, has a problem with Washington coach Mike Shanahan’s decision to sit Robert Griffin III for the rest of the season to ensure he’ll be healthy for the offseason.

Madden said on Madden Football on SiriusXM NFL Radio that players and teams owe it to the league to play to win, and Madden believes that if Griffin is healthy enough that he’d be playing if Washington were fighting for a playoff berth, he ought to be playing now.

“I do know this: when the going goes tough you don’t quit. And you don’t fold up. And you don’t go in the other direction. I think you stay with what you believe you stay with who you are, you stay with what you are. And we have an integrity piece here, too,” Madden said, via Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post. “You can say well they’re 3-10, they’re out of it, so now they can do these things. No you can’t. This is still regular-season football. Draft order, that’s one small thing, but you still owe it to the people that are playing, that are still in the playoff picture. And when you can affect that and you don’t affect it with an all-out performance, then I think that affects the integrity of the game. . . . If you’re in the regular season, there’s only one way to play, and that’s to play your best people to win the game, every regular season game.”

Madden said he fundamentally disagrees with Shanahan’s view that keeping Griffin healthy for the offseason is more important than playing him in the final three games of the regular season.

“I mean, you know it’s baloney,” Madden said. “I like Mike Shanahan, and I’m not talking behind his back, but when you say something like that, you know that’s not right — you’re not going to sacrifice regular season games. There’s only 16 of them a year. You’re not going to sacrifice regular season games for an offseason program.”

But sacrificing regular season games for an offseason program is exactly what Shanahan says he’s doing with Griffin.

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Over the weekend, we reported that the NFL has been discussing and will continue to discuss the possibility of taking replay review out of stadiums and moving it to a central location.

On Wednesday, at a quarterly ownership meeting in Dallas, Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged that such a change is being considered.

Per Albert Breer of NFL Network, Goodell acknowledged that V.P. of officiating Dean Blandino could be directly involved in the replay function.

“Our number one focus is to make sure we’re providing the best officiating,” Goodell said, via NFL.com.  “We always think we can improve.  Consistency is important.  By bringing it into the league office on Sundays and having one person actually making that decision, you can make an argument there’s consistency.”

It looks like that one person would be Blandino.  And that makes sense.  Since he’s the one who draws the short straw when it comes to explaining the mistakes made by guys like Jeff Triplette, why not just have Blandino make the decisions in the first instance, under circumstances far more conducive to making an efficient and ultimately reliable decision?

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Ravens safety Matt Elam is 5-foot-10 and 210 pounds, while Lions receiver Calvin Johnson is 6-foot-5 and 236 pounds. So it wouldn’t seem to benefit Elam to try to get physical with Megatron when the two meet on Monday night.

But Elam, a 22-year-old rookie, says that when taking on an old guy like the 28-year-old Johnson, you always have to get physical.

“He’s pretty old, so I don’t know how physical he’ll be,” Elam said. “He’s a big guy, but he’s older. I guess when they get older they’re not going to be as physical, you know what I’m saying? We’re going to have to be physical, make him uncomfortable.”

Elam also said that Johnson is a “Big, fast, athletic, unstoppable, freak,” but you can bet those “old” comments will make their way to the Lions’ locker room. The Lions have previously acknowledged getting motivation from opposing teams snubbing Megatron, such as the time then-Cowboys defensive coordinator Rob Ryan said Johnson would only be the third-best receiver on the Cowboys. After Ryan made those comments, Johnson scored two fourth-quarter touchdowns in leading Detroit to a come-from-behind victory over Dallas.

In a big game for both teams’ playoff hopes, Ravens fans will have to hope Johnson doesn’t make Elam eat his words.

After eight years on the job, NFL executive V.P. of football operations Ray Anderson has decided to leave the league office.

The NFL announced the decision on Wednesday.  In a release, the league said that Anderson will be pursuing other opportunities.

“I have been involved in many different aspects of the NFL — as an agent, club executive, and league executive,” Anderson said. “I have always enjoyed new challenges and the time is right for me to evolve into the next phase of my career.  I appreciate the opportunity Commissioner Goodell gave me and the support I have enjoyed from a great staff.”

Anderson was a central figure in last year’s lockout of game officials.  It was believed by some in the wake of the lockout that Anderson would be nudged out of his job.  He wasn’t.

In January, word surfaced that Raiders owner Mark Davis possibly would hire Anderson into a “senior executive front office job” in Oakland.  At the time, Amy Trask was serving as the team’s CEO.  She has since resigned.

It’ll be interesting to see how Anderson’s job is filled.  Last year, when we were informed that Anderson would not be fired, we also were told that key management positions no longer will go automatically to “football people” who graduated from other jobs in the football business to significant jobs in the league office.  The league could start looking for folks from other industries who have demonstrated the ability to handle high-paying, high-profile, high-power jobs that entail operating under a high-powered microscope.

Whoever gets the job, that person’s first order of business could be to finalize the penalty imposed on the Steelers for coach Mike Tomlin’s sideline side-step right.  Anderson made the initial determination regarding the imposition of a $100,000 fine on Tomlin.  Eventually, a draft-pick forfeiture or modification will be determined.

AP

The 49ers solidified their playoff chances with a victory over the Seahawks last weekend and cornerback Carlos Rogers will join us to talk about it on Wednesday’s edition of Pro Football Talk on NBCSN.

Rogers will share with Erik Kuselias his thoughts about the team’s confidence level coming out of that win as well as his general observations about whether it has been harder than expected to come back from a trip to the Super Bowl. They’ll also talk about the loss of Dashon Goldson and defensive backs hitting low during the course of the conversation.

It’s also time to start looking ahead to some of the matchups coming our way in Week 15. The PFT crew will start breaking down the storylines you need to keep in mind as we make our way toward Sunday.

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

AP

Ben Roethlisberger isn’t the only two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback whose contract has become a ball and chain for his team.

Eli Manning of the Giants also has a contract that eats up too much cap room.  And so he says he’s willing to alter his deal to create cap space.

“I haven’t thought about it, but if they come to me, yeah, we’ll discuss it and figure out a plan,” Manning said Wednesday, via Jordan Ranaan of NJ.com.

Signed through 2015 at salaries of $15.15 million and $17 million over the next two seasons (via NFLPA records), the question isn’t whether Eli is willing to move money around for cap purposes while ultimately taking the same amount of money.  The question is whether he’ll sign a new contract that extends beyond 2015 and that pays him less than the current market value for franchise quarterback, which is in the range of $20 million per year.

Via Spotrac.com, Eli counts for $20.4 million and $19.75 million over the next two years under the cap.  Getting those numbers down while also getting Manning paid in line with other quarterbacks who have fewer Super Bowl rings (including Aaron Rodgers, Joe Flacco, Drew Brees, and Matt Ryan) will be a challenge.

Plenty of players are willing to restructure their deals, since that usually means converting a large chunk of the coming year’s base salary into a signing bonus, resulting in the player getting no less money.  With Eli having only two years under contract beyond 2013, a so-called “simple restructuring” isn’t a viable option.

The Giants need to extend Eli’s contract, and there will be nothing simple about determining the right long-term value to a player who has won a pair of Super Bowls but who has missed the playoffs in four of the last five seasons.

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The Broncos waited as long as they could before officially ruling wide receiver Wes Welker out for Thursday night’s game against the Chargers, but there was no way to avoid the obvious when they released their final injury report for the game on Wednesday.

Welker has been ruled out after his second concussion in the last two weeks and will miss a regular season game for the first time since 2010. Defensive end Derek Wolfe has also been ruled out for the third straight game after he suffered seizure-like symptoms before the team’s trip to Kansas City to face the Chiefs.

Cornerback Champ Bailey played in that game, one of only three he’s been able to play this season, but didn’t play against Tennessee last week because of his injured foot. If he can’t go, the Broncos will have Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, Chris Harris and Tony Carter to throw at the Chargers receivers.

Keenan Allen will definitely be an object of their attention as he’s probable after last weekend’s shoulder injury. Eddie Royal is questionable with a toe injury, however, so the Chargers offense may not be at full strength once they make a final call on his availability.

AP

The Packers might be pessimistic, but they’re not ruling Aaron Rodgers out yet.

According to Jason Wilde of ESPNWisconsin.com, Packers tight end Andrew Quarless let the cat out of the bag, saying Rodgers took snaps with the first offense Wednesday.

Rodgers said he had too much pain while doing individual drills last week, which dampened the enthusiasm.

“Twelve [Rodgers] looked real good today,” Quarless said. “It was good to see him out there, really working with the [No. 1] offense. He was out there before but wasn’t working as much with the offense, but today he took some offensive reps, which is a great thing for the team.”

When asked to clarify they were reps with the starting offense, Quarless replied, “Yes, sir.”

While his politeness is appreciated in a day and age when the media is not held in sufficient regard, Quarless’s coach might not appreciate it. Packers coach Mike McCarthy said that Rodgers was limited, and tried to keep the speculation in check.

“We’ll see how he is tomorrow. We’ll set a plan for him again tomorrow,” McCarthy said. “Aaron still is not medically cleared, and really, I think it’s important to stay in-tune with that because the topic of ‘Is he playing in the game?’ versus ‘Is he medically cleared?’ – those are two totally different issues.

“I clearly understand the importance of Aaron to the team, to the NFL, but we’ve got to make sure we do our due diligence and go through the process of getting him healthy.”

It still seems that they’re planning on Matt Flynn starting again, but even the hope of Rodgers returning is worth hanging onto.