After spending Saturday night in jail, Browns running back Quinshon Judkins has been released from custody.
Via CBS News Miami, a judge set Judkins’s bond at $2,500 on a misdemeanor charge of domestic battery.
His release comes with a requirement to have no contact with the alleged victim. He also is prohibited from having access to firearms.
The case will continue. The NFL will consider potential discipline under the Personal Conduct Policy once the prosecution concludes.
There’s still a chance Judkins will be placed on paid leave, given the nature of the alleged crime.
Judkins is one of 30 second-round picks who have not signed, due to a lingering push-and-pull over the amount of the contract that will be guaranteed.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s arrest of Browns rookie running back Quinshon Judkins for misdemeanor domestic battery, the NFL isn’t saying much.
Via Mary Kay Cabot of Cleveland.com, chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said this regarding the Judkins arrest: “We are aware of the matter, but will decline further comment.”
The reality is that the NFL will investigate the situation. They’ll potentially impose discipline under the Personal Conduct Policy, after the criminal matter has resolved.
Before then, the league could (in theory) place Judkins on paid leave, pending resolution of the situation. It’s a case-by-case analysis, driven largely by P.R. concerns. The more serious the charges — and the more they relate to domestic violence — the more likely the league becomes to use paid leave.
As to potential discipline, the baseline suspension for domestic violence is six games. But that won’t happen until the criminal case ends.
Along the way, Judkins has protections. In the eyes of the law, he’s presumed innocent. As to the NFL, he’ll have the ability to defend himself through an eventual hearing, if it comes to that.
Regardless, the situation activates internal NFL procedures. While the league has declined comment as to Judkins, the policy and the history of enforcement of it says it all.
Browns running back Quinshon Judkins was arrested on Saturday. More details are emerging.
Via Daniel Oyefusi of ESPN.com, an official with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department Media Relations Unit said this: “On July 12th, at approximately 9 a.m., Fort Lauderdale Police Officers responded to the 1500 block of West Cypress Creek Road in reference to a delayed battery. Officers arrived on scene and spoke with the victim. During their preliminary investigation it was determined a battery had occurred. The officers made contact with the suspect and placed him into custody. He was transported to Broward County Main Jail. The suspect has been identified as Quinshon Judkins, DOB 10/29/2003 and has been charged with Misdemeanor Battery (Domestic) FSS 784.03-1a1.”
Judkins was held overnight. He’s reportedly due to have an initial hearing on Sunday.
Beyond whatever happens in the criminal justice system, Judkins eventually will be facing scrutiny from the NFL, under the Personal Conduct Policy. The baseline punishment for a battery is six games. That number can go down or up based on various factors.
Judkins has yet to sign his rookie contract. He’s one of 30 second-round picks who have yet to come to terms, over the issue of guarantees.
Some in league circles are predicting that Judkins will become the first second-round pick to take a deal with less than 100 percent of it guaranteed. Which will then trigger all contracts after his slot — 36th overall — to follow, with agents finding cover to do those deals in the Judkins arrest.
Running back Quinshon Judkins, a second-round pick in April, has been arrested in Florida.
Via the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, Judkins is being held for the following charges: “Touch or strike/battery/domestic violence.”
We became aware of the situation via a tweet from Zac Jackson of TheAthletic.com.
Judkins, a former star at Ohio State and Mississippi, apparently remains in custody. The arrest happened today.
The 36th overall pick in the draft, Judkins is one of 30 unsigned second-round picks. The issue is guaranteed money in their four-year deals.
Beyond his contract situation, the incident makes Judkins susceptible to potential discipline by the league, under the Personal Conduct Policy. Even though he has yet to sign a contract with the Browns, he falls within the scope of the policy.
The 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement created a rookie wage scale that leaves few issues on which to haggle. This year, one of those issues has prevented 30 of 32 second-round picks from signing.
The problem is simple to explain, far from simple to solve. Before 2025, no second-round picks had received fully-guaranteed rookie contracts. With the Texans giving receiver Jayden Higgins, the second pick in round two, a fully-guaranteed deal, the issue was framed.
The Browns quickly gave linebacker Carson Schwesinger, the first pick in round two, a fully-guaranteed deal. They had little choice, once the player taken immediately after him got a fully-guaranteed contract.
For the next 30 picks in round two, no deal has been done. While all of them participated in the offseason program under participation agreements, they won’t be practicing (or even present) without signed contracts.
It gets real on Saturday, when the Chargers report — and when (as noted by Adam Schefter of ESPN.com) second-round receiver Tre Harris does not.
Harris was the 23rd pick in round two. And this isn’t about whether he’ll get a fully-guaranteed deal. He won’t. Beyond determining how deep into round two the 100-percent guarantee will go, the challenge becomes setting the right percentage of full guarantee for the rest of the round.
At the risk of making this blurb too damn long, here’s the percentage of full guarantee for each of the 2024 second-round picks:
No. 1: 95.69 percent.
No. 2: 91.9 percent.
No. 3: 88.09 percent.
No. 4: 86.41 percent.
No. 5: 84.73 percent.
No. 6: 82.98 percent.
No. 7: 81.23 percent.
No. 8: 80.46 percent.
No. 9: 79.52 percent.
No. 10: 78.65 percent.
No. 11: 77.98 percent.
No. 12: 77.3 percent.
No. 13: 76.38 percent.
No. 14: 74.14 percent.
No. 15: 72.6 percent.
No. 16: 71.13 percent.
No. 17: 69.72 percent.
No. 18: 68.28 percent.
No. 19: 66.8 percent.
No. 20: 65.22 percent.
No. 21: 63.61 percent.
No. 22: 61.95 percent.
No. 23: 60.24 percent.
No. 24: 58.71 percent.
No. 25: 57.26 percent.
No. 26: 55.7 percent.
No. 27: 54.01 percent.
No. 28: 52.99 percent.
No. 29: 52.75 percent.
No. 30: 52.57 percent.
No. 31: 52.51 percent.
No. 32: 52.39 percent.
The Tre Harris slot had 60.24 percent. It will be higher this year. But how much? If Harris does his deal now, he’ll ideally set the floor for all taken ahead of him and the ceiling for all taken behind him. There’s also a chance that his percentage will be too low — which could result in players taken after him getting a higher percentage. That will become ammunition for other agents to criticize his representation at Athletes First when competing for the same incoming players.
Athletes First is relevant at the other end of the spectrum. They represent the third pick (and first unsigned pick) in round two: Seahawks safety Nick Emmanwori. Thus, as to the threshold question of how deep into the round the fully-guaranteed deals go, Emmanwori and A1 are in the batter’s box.
However it plays out, the urgency reaches full boil as players aren’t showing up for camp. And while the agents and players are permitted to coordinate/collude on a strategy for maximizing the guarantee for the players, the teams cannot coordinate/collude. Now that everyone (finally) knows about the union’s partial win in the collusion case over fully-guaranteed deals, the process from the perspective of the teams becomes a little riskier.
Or a lot.
It’s already a mess. It could soon become a full-blown fiasco, with most teams missing a key young player during training camp, and with one (Seahawks) missing two and one (Bears) missing three.
The Factory of Sadness will soon be closing. And it will eventually be demolished.
Via Rich Exner of Cleveland.com, the Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb hopes the Browns will contribute to the cost of tearing it down.
“We have spent a half-billion dollars since 1999 to support the Browns and support the Haslam family with that stadium,” Bibb said. “So, it is my hope that the Haslams and the business community will support this administration and the city to demolish the stadium to ensure we have a transformation of the lakefront.”
The Browns intend to leave Cleveland for suburban Brook Park, and a new domed stadium.
Has the door closed on a deal to keep the team in Cleveland proper? Bibb, per the report, did not directly answer that question.
It sure seems that it has. And it makes sense for the Browns to participate in the cost of unbuilding the building that was built specifically for them, when they returned to the NFL in 1999.
The Browns will get $600 million from Ohio to help pay for their new stadium in suburban Brook Park. The plan for coming up with the money is officially under legal attack.
Via Eric Fisher of FrontOfficeSports.com, a group of former Ohio legislators have filed a lawsuit challenging the decision to raid the state’s “unclaimed funds” for the $600 million.
As Fisher explains it, “unclaimed funds” come from utility deposits, uncashed cashier’s checks, bank accounts, and other abandoned money. Ohio currently has nearly $5 billion in unclaimed funds.
The plan that recently became law calls for the $600 million to be repaid by tax revenues generated at the new stadium. Still, the plaintiffs believe the law prohibits the state from borrowing against the pool of unclaimed property.
”The state now intends to confiscate the private property . . . for the purpose of funding a private development, depriving the rightful owners of their property,” the lawsuit explains, per Fisher. “The state intends to do so, even though it has long been settled that funds held by the state of Ohio in its ‘unclaimed funds’ account are private property.”
The practical argument is that the owners of the unclaimed funds won’t miss them because they’re, you know, unclaimed. The legal argument is that using the money amounts to an unlawful (and unconstitutional) taking of private property for public purposes.
If the lawsuit is successful, it won’t keep the stadium from being built. Instead, it’ll compel the state to come up with another way to pay the $600 million.
Nyheim Hines would like another shot.
Via ESPN’s Adam Schefter, Hines is looking to find a team for training camp this summer — nearly two years after suffering a torn ACL during a jet ski accident.
Hines, 28, was an effective dual-threat running back for the Colts for several years before he was traded to the Bills midway through the 2022 season. He memorably returned two kicks for touchdowns in Buffalo’s Week 18 victory over New England — a week after Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field against Cincinnati.
But Hines missed all of the 2023 season due to his torn ACL and signed with the Browns in March of last year. While Cleveland started Hines’ 21-day practice window, the club elected not to activate him off of the physically unable to perform list.
Cleveland then released Hines in February.
According to Schefter, Hines now feels his knee is finally ready for a return to action.
Hines has 1,832 return yards and four touchdowns in his career. He’s also recorded 1,205 rushing yards, 1,725 receiving yards, and 18 touchdowns from scrimmage since the Colts made him a fourth-round pick in 2018.
Joel Bitonio will be back for a 12th season with the Browns, but the left guard’s return for the 2025 campaign wasn’t a sure thing.
Bitonio took some time after the 2024 season to confirm that he’d be back in Cleveland and told Barry Shuck of Dawgs By Nature that he never doubted his ability to continue playing at a high level, but that “it was truly a decision” because of the way things played out last year. The Browns were 3-14 and went into the offseason with questions about quarterback and other spots on the roster that made it hard for Bitonio to immediately commit to returning.
The bad taste that the 2024 season left in Bitonio’s mouth along with the arrival of offensive line coach Mike Bloomgren turned out to be leading reasons why he decided to keep playing.
“It was tough. I did give consideration to retiring,” Bitonio said. “I was frustrated. Now, I don’t know if I would have the same conversation if we had gone to the playoffs again, and maybe were a 10-win team. But after having a successful year, followed by losing 14 was difficult. I questioned why I was playing this game. What am I doing here? The fact that we had a terrible season was not what I was expecting. I sat back and waited for a little bit. I talked to [head coach Kevin] Stefanski, then they brought in Bloomgren and advanced [offensive coordinator] Tommy Rees. He said they were going to draft a quarterback and make all these moves. I wanted to go out on a higher note than what we experienced last year.”
It remains to be seen if the Browns’ moves at quarterback will push the team back up the standings, but having Bitonio as part of the protection plan should help their bid for better results this time around.
The non-stop NFL news firehose often makes it easy to forget that the latest spray consists of recycled water.
A recent post on the CFL’s official website has stirred up an outdated news nugget: The Toronto Argonauts have the negotiating rights to Browns quarterback Shedeur Sanders.
Yes, they do. The same as they did in late April, after Sanders fell to pick No. 144 in the draft.
None of it matters unless and until Sanders washes out of the NFL and decides to roll the dice north of the border. Chad Kelly has done it. Doug Flutie did it. Warren Moon and Joe Thesimann used CFL success as a springboard to NFL stardom.
If Sanders is ever playing for the Argonauts, it will mean that things will have gone very poorly for him in Cleveland, and possibly elsewhere.
Regardless, the news currently making the rounds isn’t new. The Argonauts still have Shedeur’s negotiating rights. And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
