NFL Notes: Bengals, Buccaneers, Dolphins, Saints

Bengals

Bengals LS Clark Harris announced via his Twitter account that he’s been added to the 2018 Pro Bowl roster.

So just found out that I will be headed to Orlando next week. Thanks to the @steelers coaching staff for bringing me along to the 2018 @NFL #probowl. #DreamComeTrue

— Clark Harris (@ClarkHarris46) January 16, 2018

Buccaneers

Buccaneers GM Jason Licht defended the decision to retain the team’s coaching staff, despite a disappointing 2017 season during an interview with Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times.

“We’ve been pretty heavy offense,” Licht said. “It’s the way things fell. We wanted to surround our quarterback with good players. Now it’s a little bit more of a challenging phase right now to concentrate on trying to build that defense up.

“The last eight games – this is typically what you get from teams that didn’t make the playoffs – we were close in this many games and we should’ve won these games and blah, blah, blah. But as bad as everybody wants to say the defense was, we did have moments. At this point last year, we were being lauded for the best off-season move of keeping Mike Smith after a historic turnaround in 2016. And now we had a year where I’ve been on record saying it – it was brutal. But you know, you don’t just forget how to coach. You know, in the past the team has been criticized for making changes too fast. For wiping the slate clean and starting over. In this day and age, it’s understandable that people seem to want instant change.

“We feel like it’s continuity, after a deep dive here in the off-season of what the issues were, we know what they were we all think we can get better. We know we can get better. Nobody is working harder than these guys in this building right now on both sides. The answers are here in terms of the coaches, the personnel people and we have a lot of good players we feel like in this locker room that can turn this thing around.”

Dolphins

While the Dolphins value WR Jarvis Landry and would to re-sign him to a long-term deal, Armando Salguero reports that there are concerns about him behind the scenes that will impact just how far the team is willing to go to retain him this offseason.

According to Salguero, these concerns include Landry sometimes running the wrong routes, losing control and hurting the team, and not always being a leader in the locker room.

Multiple sources have told Salguero that the Dolphins view Landry as being “a pain” to deal with and “hard to reach.”

There’s also the fact that Landry should command a large salary, possibly in the range of $14-14.5 million per season per season on the open market. Salguero guesses that Miami would prefer to retain him at a salary closer to $10-$11 million per year, which means there is likely a sizeable gap in negotiations to be bridged in the coming months.

We have him featured in our Top 100  – 2018 NFL Free Agents list.

Saints

Saints LT Terron Armstead told reporters that he doesn’t think his hip will require offseason surgery, even though it’s “pretty jacked up.”

“I won’t go into specifics, but my hip is pretty jacked up along with some other things,” Armstead said, via the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “But nothing I’ve been dealing with isn’t fixable or isn’t reversible, so no permanent damage.”