The Patriots’ secondary will be much improved in 2014. October of 2014.
Cornerback Darrelle Revis will be there from the get-go. After four games, cornerback Brandon Browner will be joining the effort.
Browner tells Josina Anderson of ESPN that he has agreed on Friday to a three-year deal with the Patriots.
The agreement comes after Browner’s agent, Peter Schaffer, negotiated with three other teams -- Washington, New Orleans, and Oakland.
The negotiations resulted in an erroneous report from NFL Media on Thursday night that Browner had agreed to a two-year contract with New England. Schaffer angrily responded to the report, going on the record to call it “100 percent untrue” and lamenting the fact that his phone was blowing up with calls and texts at a time when he was trying to play in a recreational hockey league game.
His comments also spawned a quote destined to land on a T-shirt bearing a PFT logo: “I just wanna play hockey.”
Suspended for at least a year in December, Browner negotiated the ability to return to the NFL now in exchange for an agreement to abandon litigation arising from the league’s effort to subject him to substance-abuse testing while he wasn’t employed by any NFL team. Those tests, which he missed because he wasn’t made aware of them, put him within one violation of a one-year suspension. Last year, the violation happened, and the suspension was imposed.
But Browner also agreed to accept a four-game suspension. He’s presumably in Stage III of the testing program, which again puts him one violation away from a one-year suspension.
Browner initially entered the NFL in 2005 with the Broncos. Cut the following year, he eventually played in the CFL before Seahawks G.M. John Schneider brought him back to the NFL in 2011.
