NFL Notes: Bengals, Dolphins, Panthers

Bengals

Bengals backup QB A.J. McCarron told reporters on Wednesday that he isn’t upset by the fact that Cincinnati nearly traded him to the Browns before the deadline and is thankful that the team was willing to give him an opportunity to start.

“I’m not angry. I’m not upset. It feels good to be wanted,” McCarron said, via Bengals.com. “Today I’m going to thank Mr. Brown personally. I admire that he was going to give me an opportunity to go start and play somewhere. I really appreciate that of him. He’s been an unbelievable owner in my experience here.”

Bengals HC Marvin Lewis added that they view McCarron as a “very valuable” member of their team and they’re “relieved” he’s still in Cincinnati.

“AJ is a very valuable member of this team,” said Lewis. “Frankly I’m relieved.”

One of the reasons why the Browns were willing to part with second- and third-round picks for McCarron was because he’s actually set to be a restricted free agent next year, as opposed to an unrestricted free agent.

This is because he was on the non-football injury list during his rookie season.

Dan Graziano reports that McCarron and the NFLPA actually have a grievance pending with the league in an attempt to get his status changed to unrestricted. The union is arguing that he should not have been on the NFI list due to the nature and timing of the injury.

Dolphins

Dolphins HC Adam Gase explained that it remains to be seen how exactly they will divvy up carries between Kenyan Drake, Damien Williams or Senorise Perry now that they’ve traded Jay Ajayi.

“We’ll see how it works out,” Gase said, via Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald. “We’re going to go through practice this week and see what fits. I like the three guys we got, their skills sets. We’ll be able to maximize what they do well.”

Gase explained that they felt that it was time to move on from Ajayi and already talked about their future plans for him.

“I think it was just time for us to move on,” Gase said. “We’ve had conversations about what we’re going to do down the road. We felt this was a good opportunity. We kind of put some feelers out to see where other teams were at. We got some younger players there we felt we’re going to move forward with and that was the decision we came to.”

“We’ve had ups and downs but that’s with a lot of players,” Gase said of Ajayi. “It’s a lot of players and getting on the same page and sharing the philosophy of how we want to do things. He tried to do what we were asking him to do a majority of the time … It was just time for us to go separate ways.”

As for WR Jarvis Landry, Gase said they made it clear to him a while ago that they weren’t going to be trading him.

“We told him a long time ago he wasn’t going anywhere,” Gase said. “We have a vision for what we want that wide receiver room to look like and we expect him to be a huge part of that. However that works out down the road, that’s hard for me to say because I don’t negotiate the contracts.

“I’ll blame Mike [Tannenbaum] on that one.”

Panthers

• Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reports that interim Panthers GM Marty Hurney’s contract will keep him in place with Carolina through the draft and free agency next year.
• According to Florio, Hurney has spent his recent weekends on college campuses, which is a pretty good indication that he’s preparing for next year’s draft.
• When the Panthers brought Hurney back as Dave Gettleman’s replacement, it was sold as though he was going to be a temporary option at GM, but it sounds like Hurney has a real shot at keeping the job.