Thread: NFL 2017: draft, deals, and season

I think he felt some dumbass form of redemption after being cleared of the other murders, and felt like he could go kill himself on his own terms.

That's just my theory, but you have to consider who this guy always felt was #1. One last fuck you on his way out the door would very much be in keeping with his despicable character.

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/news/aa...143616551.html

"Across his second murder trial, across what would be the final days of his life before his prison cell suicide Wednesday, there was the slightest change in Aaron Hernandez. It was a behind-the-scenes betrayal of his public face, one that stared down homicide cases and life sentences with a carefree attitude and a hauntingly happy smile.

Hernandez began to talk more. Talk to whomever was around him – lawyers and court officers and courthouse workers and the few confidants who dared to show their faces. He’d always been an engaged defendant and a defiant presence, but this was different. Maybe it was four years penned up. Maybe it was the realization that this, sitting inside a courtroom, was the most contact from the outside he’d ever again get. Maybe it was a sign of what was to come, years and years, decades and decades of emptiness and regret.

So Hernandez began to talk, especially about the world that was barreling along without him. Not much, but something. From the weather to the NFL news to how his old college teammate Tim Tebow was attempting a baseball career to the traffic on the highways to and from prison. He was open to small talk.

Every day Hernandez would show up in Courtroom 906 in downtown Boston and confront a few rows of family and friends of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, who he was charged with killing one Boston summer night in 2012. There were parents and cousins and wives and friends and an entire close-knit community of Abreus and Furtados who showed up everyday in court to support each other.

He’d talk about that, too.

Hernandez had no one. Or almost no one. Most days not a single supporter showed up. Not his mother. Not his brother. Not any of the old guys he played ball with or boyhood friends or hangers-on who used to flock to his star power. Not even the folks who once cheered for him from Bristol Central High School to the University of Florida to the New England Patriots. His defense team served papers to get his old coach, Bill Belichick, to come and offer some kind of character support. Belichick managed to dodge it.

A couple months back, across the street from Suffolk County Court, a million Patriots fans turned out for a parade and rally on the bricked expanse in front of Boston’s city hall. It was the second Super Bowl won without him. Now, none still cared for him. Most just cursed him.

Other than spot appearances by his forever-loyal fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, one visit from his 4-year-old daughter and occasional trips to court by Shay’s friends, he was all, all alone.

He talked about it. And tried to laugh about it. At least he had the Department of Corrections, he’d crack. At least the court officers would stand by him, he’d say with a smile. They’d never leave him. At least he had his attorneys, he’d joke. At the beginning and end of every day of court he’d hug them, kiss them, act like he was a long-lost brother, not billable hours they’d booked the night before.

Gallows humor in the face of a gruesome reality – he was isolated and all but forgotten. A hint of him dreaming of the old days – even as he knew he was 27 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And no matter all that fantastical talk about winning a retrial in the Odin Lloyd case and winning that, nothing was ever going to change. He killed Lloyd in 2013, just as the jury said.

The evidence was overwhelming on that one. Hernandez, for all his wickedness, was never dumb.

Aaron Hernandez was found hanging from a bed sheet at 3:05 a.m. ET Wednesday inside the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center. A man who once lived the big life in a 7,100-square-foot, three-car garage mansion, stuffed his few belongings up against the cell door to buy himself a couple extra seconds to die.

The suicide came just five days after a jury found him not guilty in the deaths of Abreu and Furtado. It was a legal vindication but not much more. Hernandez was there that night, riding shotgun with his buddy, Alexander Bradley, as they pulled up on a carload of Cape Verdean immigrants they’d briefly encountered earlier. Someone opened fire, killing two, wounding one and forever changing everything.

Prosecutors could never really prove who was the triggerman. Bradley, a convicted felon and admitted drug and gun dealer, said Hernandez did it. He was getting immunity, though, and admitted he hated Hernandez so much he’d kill him if he could. Hernandez didn’t say a word.

There was scant additional evidence.

This is why drive-by shootings are so hard to crack, the district attorney lamented. It was almost the definition of reasonable doubt. The jury followed the law. The victim’s families suffered again, crushed to see Hernandez happy for an instant. Yet it was fleeting. Hernandez won a victory with no reward – he was still locked up in a dull and miserable place. It proved too much to bear.

A man of so much talent and so much promise and so much life, Hernandez leaves nothing but a wake of betrayal and tragedy. Three dead. Three people who came to this country seeking the American Dream, willing to work as landscapers and janitors to climb rungs on the ladder, all dead – if not at his hands than as part of it. Hernandez, at best, helped Bradley hide the murder car and cover up the deaths of Abreu and Furtado.

At least one other was shot, not even counting Bradley, who sits in his own Connecticut cell with one eye he said he lost at the hands of Hernandez, but the knowledge he’ll get out by 2019.

Then there is Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, who took her man’s name and stood her ground and then watched him bail. Her loyalty brought her public scorn and cost her a once inseparable relationship with her younger sister – who was Lloyd’s girlfriend at the time of his murder. Then there is the 4-year-old daughter she shared with Hernandez, who came and charmed a courtroom – she’s left with even more trauma. As for the lawyers who defended him and boldly declared they’d get him out – the court calendar will be cleared now, “abated by death.”

Hernandez betrayed everyone. He thought only of himself. Yet his greatest betrayal may have been self-inflicted – of the natural physical talent that sent him to the NFL, to the end zone of a Super Bowl, to the signature line of a $40 million contract. It was the talent his father helped cultivate and his brother tried to mentor and his mother tried to shepherd. He once had that support system. In the end it never mattered to Aaron Hernandez.

Hernandez grew up in a two-parent home until his father’s death when he was 16. The home sits on a hill in Bristol, basketball hoop in the driveway, fence out front, small yard the boys had to mow and rake as the seasons came and went. The kids would lift weights in the basement and run gassers up the hill, preparing for the big time. Around the corner is where Shayanna grew up, elementary school classmates with Hernandez and an on-again, off-again couple since junior high.

And yet when Hernandez got out of the University of Florida, he decided to pal up with Bradley, an East Hartford (Conn.) marijuana trafficker. When Hernandez made it to the NFL he decided to befriend the street life. Hernandez’s story is the strangest of them all. He wasn’t dragged back down by his hometown or old gang ties or anything like it – he sought it out. Bradley and his friends used to mock him for his cushy upbringing and comparatively quiet hometown, best known as the home of ESPN.

Being in the NFL wasn’t enough. Hernandez wanted to be a gangster, so he became a wanna-be gangster.

When he was first arrested, in June 2013, for the murder of Lloyd, he was hauled out of his oversized home and placed in a 7-by-10-foot cell that he had to pay $5 a day to “rent.” The Sherriff of Bristol County, Thomas Hodgson, put him on suicide watch and waited for the breakdown. In Hodgson’s experience, every defendant facing significant charges breaks, no matter their background. They scream they don’t belong. They cry for hours in their cell. They bang on the door and ask for extra privileges. It’s always something.

Except Hernandez did none of that. In the nearly two years inside the county jail as he awaited and then stood trial, Hodgson marveled at Hernandez’s odd detachment from reality and the ease in which he transitioned to jail. “It surprised me,” Hodgson said. “He was never nervous, never upset.”

It was chilling. Maybe it was because running from the law exhausted him. Maybe it was he knew he was safe from Bradley trying to murder him. Maybe it was all just a relief.

Four years later, though, the pressure finally got to Aaron Hernandez. The outward toughness was but a charade. Everyone else was moving on with their life, too busy or humiliated or angry with him to even show up and support him. He was sitting in a courtroom, staring at devastated families, staring at true love and loyalty, and his only buddies were the legal team paid to represent him.

“Pretty sad,” he joked to one person who was with him across the trial. Except no one laughed.

Soon he was dead, incapable of facing the future he chose, he carved out, he coveted. Soon he was gone, running from reality, crushing Shay and their daughter, the only two left who still cared.

Soon it ended for Aaron Hernandez, the tragic star of the NFL, who had it all and chose evil, who was given everything but delivered misery; a monster, in the middle of the night, dangling from a prison bedsheet".

^ Well written put and well written, IMO.

Well, the NY Post is often shite, but here is a story.
Extra, extra, read all about it. Dead thug Hernandez is presumed to have swinged both ways. He had a prison boy toy also.


Aaron Hernandez may have committed murder to cover up secret
By Laura Italiano April 21, 2017

Aaron Hernandez may have committed murder to cover up secret


Aaron Hernandez may have murdered a former pal to protect his most guarded secret — that he was bisexual, a new report says.

The muscle-bound former New England Patriots tight end allegedly had a longtime male lover, a friend from high school, and left behind a suicide note this week addressed to a gay jailhouse lover, Newsweek said.

The suicide note was one of three found in Hernandez’s cell after he hanged himself Wednesday — the other two were to his fiancée and to his 4-year-old daughter.

Hernandez, 27, had been serving life without parole in a Massachusetts prison for the 2013 shooting murder of his former pal, semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd, a slaying that ended Hernandez’s promising career less than a year into a $40 million contract extension.

Why Hernandez threw everything away to leave his friend riddled with six bullets in the gravel of a suburban Boston industrial park has remained a mystery, even after an extensive 2015 trial.

Cops long believed that Lloyd had incriminating information on Hernandez that the player didn’t want to get out.

Law-enforcement sources told the Boston Globe shortly after the player’s arrest that Hernandez feared Lloyd would rat him out in a previous double murder in 2012 — for which he was acquitted last week, just five days before the suicide.

Prosecutors only alluded at trial that Lloyd had said something to Hernandez just before his murder that destroyed his trust. A motive was never firmly established, something his lawyers noted in closing arguments.

But multiple law-enforcement officials directly involved in the Lloyd murder case now believe that the ex-pal knew about Hernandez’s bisexuality and the Patriots player feared it would be made public, Newsweek said.

Lloyd “had information the football star did not want out — that he was bisexual,” the mag said.

A co-defendant in Lloyd’s murder privately confirmed to detectives that Lloyd knew Hernandez’s secret, Newsweek reported.

Co-defendant Ernest Wallace told cops that Lloyd had slurred Hernandez as a “schmoocher,” or someone who is gay, before his death, the report said.

Wallace himself referred to Hernandez as a “limp wrist” during a taped jailhouse visit with the former player’s incarcerated cousin, the report said.

Hernandez’s alleged longtime male lover was also interviewed extensively by investigators after Lloyd’s murder and was forced to testify before a grand jury, Newsweek reported.

Hernandez moved “a large amount of money” into the lover’s bank account shortly before his arrest, Newsweek reported.

The ex-player’s prison boyfriend “is now on 24/7 suicide watch,” Newsweek said.

Hernandez was so intent on killing himself that he jammed cardboard into the frame of his cell door to thwart guards rushing to aid him — and poured liquid soap on the floor of his cell so he’d have no traction to struggle free of his bedsheet noose if he lost his nerve.

Lawyers for the Hernandez estate said they are mulling a negligence suit against Massachusetts corrections officials.

Aaron Hernandez may have committed murder to cover up secret | New York Post

^ Saw that shite the last couple of days. IMHO it's prolly tabloid bullshite. And it sounds like maybe even law enforcement is behind leaking that crapola. Nah, I ain't buying it.

Interesting though to learn about roughly how much money and other assets he might have left.

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

^ Saw that shite the last couple of days. IMHO it's prolly tabloid bullshite. And it sounds like maybe even law enforcement is behind leaking that crapola. Nah, I ain't buying it.

Interesting though to learn about roughly how much money and other assets he might have left.

Yes, it could be B.S.

There is so much BS these days.

As for his assets, his house is listed at $1.3 mill, and it can't sell.

Loyd's mother has a legal judgement and I think, a lien on the house when it sells.

Originally Posted by Cold Pizza

Lawyers for the Hernandez estate said they are mulling a negligence suit against Massachusetts corrections officials.

Your tax dollars at work ladies and gentleman.

Originally Posted by redhaze

Originally Posted by Cold Pizza

Lawyers for the Hernandez estate said they are mulling a negligence suit against Massachusetts corrections officials.

Your tax dollars at work ladies and gentleman.

Yes, beyond stupid.

Adrian Peterson signs a two year deal with the Saints.
Going to be interesting watching him walk into US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on the first Monday night game of next season, wearing that god-awful black and shit-colored gold.
Good riddance

Originally Posted by beachbound

Adrian Peterson

Boomer Sooner!

Originally Posted by beachbound

Adrian Peterson signs a two year deal with the Saints.
Going to be interesting watching him walk into US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis on the first Monday night game of next season, wearing that god-awful black and shit-colored gold.
Good riddance

No opinion on AP, but we'll see how he does. Passed his prime.

Marchawn Lynch is trying to join the Raiders.

I don't want to string this out too long on Hernandez but I'm watching the testimony of Alexander Bradley. Hernandez's friend (who was with him during the double murder) who Hernandez later shot between the eyes and dumped his body on the road in Florida. Of course, he lived.

His stats for the last year he played were not good (albeit with a weak o-line).

I'd doubtful but we shall see.

Marshawn Lynch officially is a member of the Oakland Raiders.

The Raiders announced Wednesday they acquired Lynch in a trade with the Seattle Seahawks. Lynch and the Raiders earlier agreed to terms on a contract that allows him to come out of retirement and play for his hometown team.

Raiders acquire Marshawn Lynch in trade with Seahawks - NFL.com

Huh, interesting. First round of the draft is tomorroW, finally!

Last year the offseason went by so fast it seemed like, this year really seems to be dragging....

Originally Posted by redhaze

Huh, interesting. First round of the draft is tomorroW, finally!

Last year the offseason went by so fast it seemed like, this year really seems to be dragging....

Yes, draft day is coming up. I've been reading a little but not much.

I follow it after the picks are taken.

As for Lynch, it's a two year deal worth $9 million.

He obviously passed his physical and I assume he's been training hard.

But I'm skeptical. Again, we'll see. Yes it's interesting.

Originally Posted by Cold Pizza

As for Lynch, it's a two year deal worth $9 million.

Apparently $3 million the first year and the other $6 million is for an option year the Raiders aren't even obligated to pick up.

Sounds like Lynch really wanted to be a Raider to me.

http://www.silverandblackpride.com/2...nally-reported

"The initial reports have Lynch signing a deal that pays him a base of $3 million for 2017 with a $2 million bonus should he reach 1000 yards. And the max over two seasons was expected to be $8.5 million which is less than the base Rapoport is reporting.

For both the initial report of his earning in 2017 and Rapoport’s report to be accurate, that would mean Lynch would receive twice his 2017 base salary in 2018 should the team pick up his option — that’s $3 million in 2017 and $6 million in 2018.

That would make picking up that option look highly unlikely. Teams don’t go around doubling the salaries of running backs on the wrong side of 30.

The max money of $16.5 million is just absurd and I would bet outside of the $2 million 1K rushing bonus, the remaining incentives are not to be reached".

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

Originally Posted by Cold Pizza

As for Lynch, it's a two year deal worth $9 million.

Apparently $3 million the first year and the other $6 million is for an option year the Raiders aren't even obligated to pick up.

Sounds like Lynch really wanted to be a Raider to me.

http://www.silverandblackpride.com/2...nally-reported

"The initial reports have Lynch signing a deal that pays him a base of $3 million for 2017 with a $2 million bonus should he reach 1000 yards. And the max over two seasons was expected to be $8.5 million which is less than the base Rapoport is reporting.

For both the initial report of his earning in 2017 and Rapoport’s report to be accurate, that would mean Lynch would receive twice his 2017 base salary in 2018 should the team pick up his option — that’s $3 million in 2017 and $6 million in 2018.

That would make picking up that option look highly unlikely. Teams don’t go around doubling the salaries of running backs on the wrong side of 30.

The max money of $16.5 million is just absurd and I would bet outside of the $2 million 1K rushing bonus, the remaining incentives are not to be reached".

Yes, what you say makes perfect sense. In reality it's a one year thing.

Hope he does well. He's had a year to rest up and strengthen and I assume he's trained well.

I don't have high expectations in running backs that have been in the league as long as he has and he's a beat 'em up type of back. They don't last long.

^ Can't remember off the top of my head how much money he walked away from by not playing last season ... but to come back and play now for what essentially amounts to chump change for him I actually find kind of surprising. IMHO it's gotta be something as simple as he can play in his backyard in front of his peeps.

Tried to find out how much his endorsement deals were/are ... best I could find was a couple years old article showing he made around $5 million a year.

Lynch is a strange guy, not really sure money is his primary motivation.

So.....the draft has started. Bears give away the house to move up one singular spot from number 3 to number 2 to draft Trubinski.

I think this is going to end up being a giant blunder in hindsight. Not just because Trubinski wasn't worth the cost, but also because I think San Fran was clearly bluffing at drafting Trubinski. I think the Bears wait and they get him at number 3 for free.

Great game of poker by the 9ers, I think the Bears were fooled quite badly

Looks like the Chiefs are about to draft a QB as well. And they gave up the house.

Gonna be a run on crappy QB's it seems like. I hope the Cardinals are smart and don't get involved in this nonsense.

Panthers made a great pick. McCaffrey is gonna be a star in my opinion... Should fit right in with Cam Newton. I know Steph Curry is happy....

^^

Patrick Mahomes may be the best quarterback in the draft.

And they didn't. And got a top 10 pick at number 13 in Riddick.

Good first round for us.

This year is like that year that saw Gabbert, Ponder, Locker, etc come off the board in the first round and none of them were worth those spots. It wasn't just obvious in hindsight either.

Wonder where this guy Jabril Peppers from "that team up north"will go:

Jabrill Peppers' NFL Draft stock hurt by position fit, not positive test | NFL | Sporting News

"The former Michigan Wolverines defensive standout, during his drug screening at the Combine, tested positive for a dilute sample, ESPN's Adam Schefter reported Monday. The explanation from Peppers was he drank a ton of water for his busy on-field workouts as both a linebacker and a safety".

And my guy Joe Mixon for OU:

NFL scout says Joe Mixon has first-round talent, but incident likely to hurt draft stock | News OK

Originally Posted by aging one

McCaffrey is gonna be a star in my opinion...

Don't know but like Andrew Luck I have nothing but positive vibes for the boy.