As four-time Pro Bowl defensive lineman Jay Ratliff is getting closer to finding a second NFL home after his October release from the Dallas Cowboys, the Cowboys may have unfinished business with him. According to STAR, the Cowboys' official publication, the team has good reason to take legal action on him in regards to his salary.
Ratliff, who signed a five-year $40 million contract extension with the Cowboys in 2011, got $18 million guaranteed as part of the deal. This year marked the first in which his adjusted salary went into effect. The article in the STAR raises the question whether Ratliff, because he didn't want to play for the Cowboys, led them on with his injury status, both in recovering from a sports hernia last season and a hamstring this offseason. He had been on the physically unable to perform list on his release date (Oct. 16) but was cleared to work out for other teams a week later (Oct. 23).
Adding to the Cowboys' challenge with Ratliff over the past year was his January 2013 DUI, which came soon after a December 2012 drunken-driven accident involving teammate Josh Brent, which led to the death of another teammate, Jerry Brown.
According to ESPN, Ratliff visited the Kansas City Chiefs and Chicago Bears this week. While the Chiefs could use some end depth in their strong 3-4, the Bears have been depleted at tackle in their 4-3 after losing Henry Melton and Nate Collins to knee injuries (both torn ACLs) early.
If Ratliff, 30, agrees on a new contract with a new team soon, it will be interesting what approach his former team, the Cowboys, takes in trying to recoup what they paid him so far in 2013.
49ERS' SMITH ACTIVATED
All-Pro 49ers linebacker Aldon Smith was activated to the 53-man roster from the non-football injury list Thursday, two days after he turned himself in to Santa Clara County authorities as he faces weapons charges.
Smith had been undergoing rehab at an in-patient facility for substance abuse since late September and missed five games. With San Francisco (6-2) on its bye this week, Smith could resume practicing and working out on his own, then formally practice next week ahead of a Nov. 10 home game against the Carolina Panthers.
Smith was charged Oct. 9 with three felony counts of illegal possession of an assault weapon, stemming from a party at his home in June 2012.
49ers coach Jim Harbaugh said on his weekly radio show with 95.7 The Game that Smith met with 49ers officials Wednesday at team headquarters. General manager Trent Baalke said last week in London that Smith would have to show "progress" to play again this year.
Smith will be due in court twice — Nov. 12 and Nov. 19 — to face DUI and weapons charges.
The 24-year-old Smith had been on what the team called an indefinite leave of absence from the NFC champion Niners. Smith's agent didn't immediately return requests for comment Thursday.
Harbaugh traded text messages with Smith when he was gone, and the coach said on the radio "he's made quite a bit of progress."
While Smith is likely to face a suspension from the NFL, the league typically waits until all legal issues are resolved before handing down its own discipline.
BIZARRE TIRADE AGAINST NFL
Former NFL safety Hamza Abdullah, who played seven years for the Broncos and Cardinals, unleashed a profane Twitter assault on the league Thursday morning for, as he put it early in his 15-minute-long outburst, “doing your former players the way you’re doing em.’’
Along the way, he directly accused the NFL and its treatment of former players during and after their careers of driving them to suicide — and him to thoughts of suicide.
“I’ve thought about that, and the only reason I won’t, is because I’m Muslim,’’ tweeted Abdullah, 30, who last played for Arizona in 2011 and who joined his younger brother Husain, also an NFL defensive back, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 2012. The younger Abdullah played four years for Minnesota before their sabbatical, and now plays for Kansas City.
“Every time I go to sleep, I pray that Allah takes care of my family, just in case I don't wake up,’’ Hamza Abdullah wrote. “And quietly, I'm disappointed sometimes when I do wake up.”
His account, @HamzaAbdullah21, which has more than 10,000 followers, went viral almost immediately after he began his verbal assault on the NFL with this tweet: “(Expletive) you @NFL #NFL”. Several of the tweets that followed included some version of the same phrase, including a few directing it toward commissioner Roger Goodell.
“You would sell your ... soul for a dollar,’’ he tweeted.
He also said of the league, “You are the plantation and WE are the slaves!!!” He described the annual combine as “that slave trade” in which the league “strip(s) us of our manhood.’’
Abdullah included a photo of himself, as a Bronco, absorbing a collision between his head and the hip of a Chiefs player in a 2007 game. It was one of two games that season in which, he said, “I knocked myself out.’’.
DAVIS SHARES AVAILABLE
Soon, NFL fans will be able to buy stock in San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis. Fantex, the brokerage company that already plans to sell shares of whatever Houston Texans running back Arian Foster earns in the future, told ESPN.com that it's making a similar deal with Davis.
Davis is giving up 10 percent of his earnings on and off the field that include salary and endorsements for $4 million. With the stock offered in Davis, those who buy shares in his brand can trade them based on his performance. Fantex, in early October had given Foster $10 million to secure the rights to 20 percent of his future earnings.
With the 49ers on a Week 9 bye, it's good timing for Davis, who's having an outsanding 2013 season. Based on his first half, he's on pace for 1,036 yards and 14 touchdowns. The 49ers are getting good returns from Davis, whom they gave $23 million guaranteed. He is earning $6 million in base salary before any endorsement deals.
Foster and Davis are protopyical modern, successful players who are dedicated to taking care of their image and bodies at a high level for football and beyond. It's no surprise they were the first two NFL players to get involved with Fantex. Now fans must decide if they want part of their brands.
COACH, PLAYER AT IT AGAIN
They’re feuding in Washington, and only one of the feuders is even a member of the organization. Yet it was that participant, head coach Mike Shanahan, who has escalated a war of words that retired tight end Chris Cooley had begun against free-agent bust Albert Haynesworth, and that Haynesworth then re-directed toward Shanahan.
On Thursday, Shanahan responded to Haynesworth’s remarks on a Tennessee radio station the day before (“He’s conniving ... It’s all about him ... The guy is all ‘me me me’”) by blistering the retired defensive tackle in his daily press conference after practice.
“The people I look at, that come back and complain or do some of those things that you do when you don’t get along with someone, [they] usually fall into one of those couple of areas: lazy, lack of passion and, a lot of times, a lack of character,’’ Shanahan told reporters, according to a transcript by Comcast SportsNet Washington. Shanahan then added, “And he fits all three.”
Haynesworth, who last played in the NFL for Tampa Bay in 2011, and Shanahan overlapped in Washington for the 2010 season — the last of his two, disastrous and expensive seasons there, and the first for Shanahan as coach. The season was bookended by the daily fitness tests Shanahan put Haynesworth through in training camp, and his suspension for conduct detrimental to the team in December.
Cooley, who retired before this season, ignited everything on Monday when, on his Washington daily radio show, he called his former teammate “an awful human being” whose only goal upon signing there was “to be released as soon as possible and basically take $33 million from you for absolutely nothing.”
Haynesworth, in the same radio interview in which he took aim at Shanahan, replied to Cooley by saying he “sounds as stupid as he looks,” adding, “I think all he’s trying to do now is kiss the backside of Shanahan’s behind to try to get back on the team because he needs a job so he can promote his socks.”
Contributors: David Steele, Vinnie Iyer, The Associated Press