As his second season of banishment from the NFL concludes, Ray Rice isn’t ready to concede that his playing career is over.
“I do want to play football again and I’m not ready to give up,” Rice said on the Dan Patrick Show.
At the same time, Rice seems to be coming to the realization that it’s a long shot that someone will give him a second chance after he became America’s domestic violence poster boy. Rice said that he was thinking he’d get a call to go to a team’s training camp, and when that didn’t happen, he started to realize most NFL teams weren’t interested in him.
“I thought early in the year,” he said. “I would have loved to be in a training camp, learn an offense and things like that.”
Rice said he stays in great shape regardless of whether his career is over because fitness is important to him, so he’ll be ready any time a team calls. But the reality is, if that call were going to happen, it likely would have happened already. Rice had his worst season in 2013, averaging only 3.1 yards a carry, and hasn’t been on the field in two years. Rice isn’t ready to give up, but NFL teams are giving up on the idea of Rice playing for them.