Bengals' Burrow could miss weeks with calf strain

By The Associated Press

Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow could miss “several weeks” with a right calf strain, coach Zac Taylor said Friday.

The 26-year-old franchise quarterback hobbled on one leg and then went to the ground after a scramble play near the end of Thursday’s practice. He rode off the field in a medical cart.

“It will take several weeks, and that’s all the information we have,” Taylor said.

Burrow did not practice Friday, with backup QBS Jake Browning and Trevor Siemian taking the snaps. The Bengals play their first preseason game on Aug. 11 and open the regular season Sept. 10.

Taylor said Burrow “has seen the doctors” and was present for meetings at the team’s training facility Friday. The quarterback was wearing a compression sleeve on his right calf when he pulled up with the injury, but Taylor said Friday he was unaware there was anything wrong before that play.

Burrow is still negotiating with the Bengals on a longterm contract that could make him one of the NFL’S highest-paid players.

The team’s top draft pick in 2020 had talked Wednesday about how good he felt at the opening of camp after his first three NFL training camps were disrupted and how he hoped to play in some preseason games.

Preseason practice was truncated in Burrow’s rookie year in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2001, he was still rehabbing after knee surgery the previous December. On the first day of camp last year, he was stricken with appendicitis.

Payton apologizes for criticism of Hackett

Broncos coach Sean Payton said Friday he regrets disparaging his predecessor in an interview in which he called the work Nathaniel Hackett and his staff did in Denver last season “one of the worst coaching jobs in the NFL” and said there were “20 dirty hands” around Russell Wilson’s career-worst season.

“Listen, I had one of those moments where I still had my Fox hat on and not my coaching hat,” said Payton, who’s returning to the sideline this season after a year’s sabbatical during which he worked as a studio football analyst for Fox Sports following a 15-year stint with the New Orleans Saints.

Payton’s comments in an interview with USA Today’s Jarrett Bell rocked the NFL because he broke the coaches code in which they refrain from publicly lambasting one another and because he spent his first six months on the job admonishing his players not to look back at last year’s dismal season and to ignore “outside noise.”

“I said this to the team in the meeting yesterday: we’ve had a great offseason relative to that, you know, and I’ve been preaching that message and here I am the veteran” doing just that, Payton said during a lengthy mea culpa in his first comments since he ignited the firestorm.

said shortly after practice that Turner was still being evaluated and did not go into further detail.

Seahawks’ top pick Witherspoon ends training camp holdout

The brief training camp holdout of Seattle Seahawks first-round pick Devon Witherspoon ended Friday when the No. 5 overall pick from the draft signed his rookie contract.

Witherspoon missed the first two days of training camp but was expected to be on the field for Seattle’s third practice later Friday. Witherspoon, a standout in college at Illinois, was the last player from this year’s draft class to sign his rookie contract.

Witherspoon signed a four-year contract worth a guaranteed $31.8 million as the terms of being selected fifth overall. The delay in his arrival at training camp was due to an impasse over bonus money.