“Fire Millen” poster boy now bust in two countries

By Os Davis  |   Thursday, June 05, 2008  |  Comments( 1 )

Detroit Lions
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With everything so heavily covered in a thick veneer of online irony these days, it’s hard to tell whether recent chapters in the saga of former Detroit Lions bust Charles Rogers are funny, sad or just plain bizarre.

As all long-suffering Lions fans are all too aware, Rogers was drafted second overall out of Michigan State University in 2003. He would soon gain much ignominy as an all-too-typical example of team president Matt Millen’s draft-related incompetence this decade. The audacity of taking a wide receiver at such a high spot (one pick after Carson Palmer! One selection ahead of Andre Johnson! Three choices ahead of Terence Newman!) was superseded only by the subsequent contract’s obscene size.

The invoice started at a $9.1 million signing bonus. In 2004, the contract called for a further bonus of $5.3 million. In total, Rogers’ deal represented a potential whopping $20 million over seven years. Rogers then turned in an incredible career in Detroit (15 games played in three seasons, 36 receptions, 457 total yards, out for nearly all of 2004.) In 2005, Rogers was suspended by the NFL for violation of drug policy. As a result, the team went to arbitration seeking to recover more than $10 million of its former receiver’s $14.4 million signing bonus.

In August 2006, Detroit media had it that head coach Rod Marinelli wanted to cut both Rogers and former No. 10 overall Mike Williams, but salary-cap restrictions were forcing the team to keep both. In a classic lesser-of-two-evils scenario, the Lions went with Rogers -- who was released on September 2nd.

And earlier this year, it seemed that Rogers actually really did want to, you know, play some professional football. In late April, the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes announced that Rogers had verbally agreed to terms with the team and would be attending camp.

Nope.

The Detroit Free-Press hilariously and strangely reported late last week that “Ex-Lion Charles Rogers, agent not returning calls to CFL team.” (Sometimes a headline really does say it all, eh?) Since then, Rogers’ hometown paper, The Saginaw News, reported that “The Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League opened training camp Sunday without [Rogers]." Meanwhile, Rogers’ agent sent a sole email to the team querying whether the signed contract had been received.

Positively, the Alouettes are choosing to ignore these bush-league tactics.

"We've never booked him a flight for training camp and haven't received his contract," Alouettes general manager Jim Popp has since stated. "We’re not expecting him.”

So much for the Charles Rogers era in Montreal.

(On a side note, it doesn’t take much to note that the Alouettes have blown quite a bit of cash on American busts at the wide receiver position and have scarce little to show for it: Peter Warrick signed and was bounced within days after a team medical exam revealed serious damage in the knee. Ex-Arizona Cardinal WR David Boston has a foot injury serious enough to warrant a temporary suspension from the team. Montreal should have quite the, um, interesting passing game this year; and what’s up with salary-cap rules in the CFL, anyway?)

Surely such a non-move is detrimental to Rogers’ case in court, but for unexplained reasons Rogers is dissing the CFL; his career is more firmly set in graveyard spiral mode than anyone’s this side of Hillary Clinton. And once some judge gets a look at Rogers’ bubblegum card and laughs his claims out of court, it’ll be the last we hear of a lamentable episode in Lions history.

Until we’re running down Millen’s gaffes in the article about his firing, that is . . .
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About Os Davis

Os Davis has taken a twisted route to get to RealFootball365.com in his nearly 17 years in professional writing, working in any number of capacities in the sportswriting, news reporting and film criticism worlds. In print media, Os has served as editor at a few publications, including Albuquerque's...
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