Lions wide receiver Kenny Golladay has not played since Week 8 due to a hip injury and interim head coach Darrell Bevell said on Friday that the team will talk about shutting him down for the rest of the year.
Golladay came into the year off back-to-back 1,000-yard campaigns that led to speculation about a new contract for the 2017 third-round pick. No contract came before the year and Golladay is now on track to become a free agent, which led to a question for Bevell about whether that is factoring into Golladay’s continued absence from the lineup.
Bevell said that Golladay “really wants to play” and pushed back at any notion that the wideout is making a “business decision.”
“I can be clear that he’s not,” Bevell said, via Kyle Meinke of MLive.com. “The guy is competing, he’s working hard. The good thing for me is that I’m in here every day, I get to see what he’s doing. I get to see what he’s putting his body through to try to get back for us and for his teammates. He’s doing that. That’s really what I could say. I love his competitiveness, love what he’s trying to do, it’s just he’s working with an injury that he’s trying to work through.”
Golladay’s contract will be one of many issues for the Lions’ next General Manager to deal with once they’ve been hired and it doesn’t sound like the wideout will be putting anything else on film for that person to watch before making the call.