A week after the NFL reinstated five gambling offenders, Isaiah Rodgers now has the green light to resume his career. Banned for the 2023 season after a gambling scandal, the veteran cornerback has since been reinstated.
Tuesday’s decision will give Rodgers the opportunity to move to the Eagles’ active roster. While the Commanders cut Shaka Toney rather than add him to their offseason roster, they have a new regime in place. The staff that signed Rodgers following his Colts release remains, providing a good indication he remains in the Eagles’ 2024 plans.
Rodgers’ reinstatement is interesting given what he was accused of doing before being popped under the gambling policy. A 2020 sixth-round pick, Rodgers is believed to have made “hundreds” of wagers; some of those were believed to be bets on Colts games. Most of the bets were worth between $25-$50, though one wager was believed to be in the four-digit range. The NFL banned a number of players for all of the ’23 season due to betting on NFL games; six-game bans came as a result of other players making non-NFL bets while on team grounds.
The Colts waived the former starting corner once news of his ban emerged in June 2023. The Eagles made what amounted to a stash addition two months later, moving Rodgers to their reserve/suspended list upon setting their 53-man roster in August. Rodgers was with Philly throughout last season, but he stands to begin practicing soon.
In an aging Eagles CB corps, Rodgers is going into his age-26 season. He joins Darius Slay, James Bradberry and Avonte Maddox as Eagles corners with notable starting experience. Slay and Bradberry will each be north of 31 by Week 1, with the injury-prone slot player now 28. The Eagles also used a fourth-round pick on Georgia’s Kelee Ringo last year.
A UMass alum, Rodgers intercepted three passes in 2021 and returned a kick for a score in 2020. The latter skill is now more relevant, seeing as the NFL greenlit a rule experiment that will see the kickoff return make its way back to a regular sequence. Working as Indianapolis’ primary kick returner throughout his three-season stay, Rodgers started nine games at corner for the team in 2022. He showed some promise in an expanded defensive role that year, ranking (per Pro Football Focus) as the NFL’s fifth-best corner that year.
This assessment came on just 283 defensive snaps, however, and Rodgers does not profile as a player who will have a fast track toward an Eagles starting job. But he should have an opportunity to contribute soon.
Great pickup by howie.
Only a small gamble….
Nothing better than an idiot who is gambling on his own sport. Hopefully he doesn’t actually ever play a down.
lol
The idiot is someone who actually believes this betting is a threat to the integrity of the game. You would have to be completely naive to think owners coaches and players haven’t been making football bets every year since Halas created the league. The technology now exists to track betting more efficiently but that shouldn’t suggest that this is a new phenomenon. If this betting were actually a threat why has the league survived and flourished for more than a century? The only thing that has really changed is that betting is more accessible to the public than in the past when bookies handled the action in the shadows. Goodell’s gambling policy is just a sham that exposes the league’s hypocrisy as they partner with sites like Draft Kings and Fan Duel.