Bengals Place Auden Tate On IR
Auden Tate‘s season is officially over. On Tuesday, as expected, the Bengals placed the wide receiver on injured reserve.
Tate suffered an MCL sprain last week and the club had little reason to put him in harms way as the season winds down. The 2018 seventh-round pick, played sparingly during his rookie campaign, but he showed promise this year as the team’s No. 2 WR in A.J. Green‘s stead. In 12 games (ten starts) this season, the 22-year-old has hauled in 40 receptions for 575 yards and one touchdown.
Willis, meanwhile, has nine grabs in ten games this season. The undrafted rookie hopes to cement his place on the Bengals’ 2020 roster, which figures to look drastically different.
The Bengals own the league’s worst record with three games left in the regular season. Unless they pick up wins against the Patriots, Dolphins, and Browns, they’ll pick No. 1 overall in April.
Falcons To Sign CB Jamar Taylor
The Falcons are signing cornerback Jamar Taylor, as Mike Garafolo of NFL.com tweets. The veteran appeared in nine games with the Seahawks earlier this year before being released in late November.
Taylor had three passes defensed with the Seahawks, who dropped him twice in 2019 – once in August and again in November. All in all, he’s been a part-timer in his seventh pro season, notching 20 tackles in nine games as a backup.
The Falcons’ season is effectively over, but Taylor will get a chance to showcase himself before free agency begins in March. Still only 29, the former second-round pick could put himself in line for a deal with a cornerback-needy team.
With three games to go, the Falcons are 4-9 and in line for the No. 8 overall pick.
Colts To Sign Dontrelle Inman
The Colts are bringing back Dontrelle Inman. On Tuesday, the Colts agreed to re-sign the wide receiver, as NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport tweets.
The Colts are banged up at the position – star T.Y. Hilton is week-to-week with a calf injury and, just this week, rookie Parris Campbell landed on injured reserve with a fractured foot. Inman, who spent some time with the Colts last year, could offer some badly needed veteran depth at wide receiver.
Inman entered the league as an undrafted free agent out of Virginia in 2014 and emerged as a legitimate pass-catching option for the Bolts. In 2016, he enjoyed a breakout season with 58 catches for 810 yards and four touchdowns.
Ever since, he’s bounced around a bit. The Chargers traded Inman to the Bears midway through the 2017 season, where he was unable to recapture his old magic. Then, he inked a one-year deal with the Colts and went on to catch 28 passes for 304 yards and three scores in nine games.
This year, he had a brief dalliance with Patriots before circling back to the Chargers. The veteran shined in Week 4 when he caught five balls for 76 yards as Mike Williams‘ fill-in, but a quad injury landed him on IR and, eventually, put him on the curb.
Inman will make his return to the gridiron this week when the Colts face the Saints. At 6-7, a loss would mathematically eliminate them from playoff consideration. Even with win, of course, they’ll still be facing long odds.
NFL Practice Squad Updates: 12/9/19
Today’s practice squad updates:
Detroit Lions
- Signed: LB Anthony Pittman
- Released: TE Cole Herdman
New York Jets
- Signed: OL Brad Lundblade
Minor NFL Transactions: 12/9/19
Today’s minor moves:
Chicago Bears
- Promoted: LB Devante Bond
Green Bay Packers
- Waived: OL Adam Pankey
Jacksonville Jaguars
- Signed off Patriots practice squad: Tyler Gauthier
Los Angeles Chargers
- Waived: DB Tevaughn Campbell
New York Jets
- Promoted: WR Jeff Smith
- Placed on IR: CB Kyron Brown
Colts Place Parris Campbell On IR
Parris Campbell has been placed on season-ending injured reserve with a broken foot, per a club announcement. This marks an early end to the wide receiver’s underwhelming rookie campaign. 
[RELATED: Adam Vinatieri To Undergo Season-Ending Surgery]
Campbell, a speedy receiver out Ohio State, broke his foot early on in Sunday’s loss to the Bucs. The second-round pick finishes out the year with just 18 receptions for 121 yards in seven games. To his credit, he continued to play against Tampa Bay even after suffering the fracture.
Campbell led Ohio State in receiving yards (1,063) as a senior, becoming Dwayne Haskins‘ top target during the first-round pick’s lone season as the Buckeyes’ starter. Campbell also led Ohio State with 12 touchdown catches, slotting him ahead of fellow Day 2 pick Terry McLaurin. McLaurin, selected 17 spots later, has 46 catches for 703 yards and six touchdowns through 12 games for the Redskins.
At 6-7, the Colts are still technically alive in the playoff picture. They’ll fight for their paper thin chances this week against the 10-3 Saints, in New Orleans.
49ers’ Weston Richburg Done For Year
Bad news for the Niners. Center Weston Richburg is done for the year thanks to a torn patella tendon, head coach Kyle Shanahan announced. 
Richburg will be placed on injured reserve, leaving one of the league’s best teams without its anchor on the offensive line. He’s been a rock for the 49ers since joining the club on a five-year, $47.5MM deal prior to the 2018 season. In 2018, he played in 15 games despite an ongoing knee issue, which was addressed by surgery in January. Unfortunately, this knee injury will require another surgery and ample time to heal, ruling him out for the rest of the regular season and playoffs.
Last year, Pro Football Focus gave Richburg the lowest grade (51.9) of his five-year career. This year, he fared slightly better with a 59.8 score, but those numbers don’t quite reflect his importance to the Niners’ line. He’s allowed just one sack this year and the Niners rank No. 4 in total offense league-wide.
Without Richburg, the Niners will likely install Ben Garland as their starting center, starting this week. They’re also likely to look into some interior line reinforcements, starting with practice squad guard Ross Reynolds.
Raiders’ Foster Moreau Done For Year
Foster Moreau‘s season is over. On Monday, head coach Jon Gruden announced that the fourth-round tight end will not play again in 2019.
Moreau exited Sunday’s game against the Titans with a knee injury, and it’s serious enough to rule him out for the rest of the slate. Before the injury, Moreau hauled in three passes for 14 yards, including his fifth touchdown reception of the year. In total, he finishes out with those five TDs, plus 21 catches for 174 hard-fought yards.
Moreau didn’t have a gaudy stat line as a rookie, but he did develop a strong rapport with Derek Carr, who gave him more and more red zone looks as the year went on. He’ll look to build off of that in 2020, when it really counts – the Raiders are, for all intents and purposes, out of playoff consideration. Their 6-7 record means that they’ll need more than just one Christmas miracle to qualify, even if they run the table.
The Raiders – sans Moreau – will face the Chargers in Week 16. On the plus side, they might have rookie receiver Hunter Renfrow back in action.
Cowboys Waive Brett Maher, Sign Kai Forbath
The Cowboys are making a change at kicker. Dallas has waived Brett Maher and is signing Kai Forbath, per a team announcement.
In the wake of Maher’s struggles in 2019, the Cowboys worked out three kickers last week, but they elected to give Maher another shot. Unfortunately, Maher missed a field goal attempt in the team’s loss to the Bears on Thursday, so Dallas hosted another workout today. Forbath was obviously one of the three kickers the team brought in, along with Nick Rose and Tristan Vizcaino (Rose and Vizcaino were also part of last week’s audition).
Forbath has much more experience than his fellow tryout candidates, which obviously appeals to the Cowboys. Over parts of seven seasons with five different clubs, Forbath has a strong 85.8% success rate on field goal attempts. He kicked for the Patriots last week as a one-game fill-in for Nick Folk, making a 23-yard field goal attempt and going 1-2 on extra points.
Maher, meanwhile, hits the waiver wire after he was unable to replicate his solid 2018 performance. He converted just 66.7% of his field goal tries in 2019, and he missed all but one of his five tries from 40-49 yards. The Cowboys, in the thick of a division title race, exercised as much patience as they could but ultimately were compelled to move on.
Adam Vinatieri To Undergo Season-Ending Surgery
12:12pm: Mike Chappell of CBS 4 says Vinatieri’s surgery is to repair meniscus and patellar issues. Those issues have certainly contributed to Vinatieri’s struggles this year, and apparently Vinatieri believes he can return to form after he recovers. He wants to at least give himself a chance to kick for a 25th season, which is why he is undergoing the surgery now. “But I promise you one thing: I’m gonna bust my dang ass every day from Wednesday until whenever to give myself a chance to see [if I can keep playing],” Vinatieri said. “If it’s there, it’s there. If it’s not, it’s not.”
09:23am: Adam Vinatieri‘s season is over, and his career may be as well. Per Adam Schefter of ESPN.com, Vinatieri will undergo season-ending knee surgery, and the Colts will place him on IR (Twitter link).
Vinatieri missed Sunday’s loss to the Buccaneers with the knee injury, and given that the soon-to-be 47-year-old was in the midst of the worst season of his storied career, it would not be a surprise to see him hang up the cleats.
If so, it would be a disappointing end for the future Hall-of-Famer. He ends the 2019 campaign having converted just just 17-of-25 field goals and 22-of-28 extra points, and his struggles are one of the reasons why Indianapolis is all but eliminated from playoff contention.
In the long run, though, that will just be an unpleasant footnote to a tremendous resume that includes four Super Bowl rings, three First Team All-Pro nods, and a bevy of clutch kicks. Sunday’s game was also the first he had missed since Super Bowl XLIV, and he had kicked in every Colts game over the past 10 seasons.
The Colts will likely to continue to deploy Chase McLaughlin in Vinatieri’s absence, though McLaughlin did miss a field goal try in Indy’s three-point defeat to Tampa Bay.