NFL Suspends Jets LB Brandon Copeland
Another linebacker down for the Jets. On Wednesday, Brandon Copeland was suspended four games by the NFL for performance-enchanting substances. 
Copeland’s suspension comes on the heels of Avery Williamson‘s season-ending ACL tear, leaving the Jets even thinner in the LB group. The club already signed former Saints and Dolphins ‘backer Stephone Anthony to help fill the gap, but they could go shopping once again for depth.
Copeland is eligible to participate in the Jets’ two remaining preseason contests as well as their remaining preseason practices, but he’ll be barred from playing until Oct. 7, thanks to the Jets’ Week 4 bye.
In 2018, his first year with the Jets, Copeland managed 35 tackles and five sacks. He played the full 16-game slate, including ten starts.
Latest On Chargers, Melvin Gordon
The holdout of Chargers running back Melvin Gordon is expected to continue into the season, sources tell Ian Rapoport of NFL.com (on Twitter). At this stage, contract talks have not progressed as he hoped, and Gordon plans to train in Florida for the foreseeable future. 
Gordon can’t sit out the entire season — or at least, he can’t sit out the entire season if he wants to become a free agent next spring (which he does). If Gordon doesn’t report by November 29, he won’t be eligible to play during the 2019 campaign. At that point, his contract would toll: his $5.605MM salary would simply carry over to 2020, and he’d remain under the Chargers’ control.
Gordon has simultaneously said that he’d like to remain with Los Angeles and formally requested a trade. Meanwhile, “mounting pessimism” exists that Gordon and the Chargers will strike any sort of deal before the regular season gets underway. The Chargers are reportedly offering Gordon something in the neighborhood of $10MM annually, but the former first-round pick is looking for an additional $2-3MM per season.
Gordon, 26, has averaged 907 yards and seven touchdowns on the ground during his four-year career. He’s averaged 46 catches, 395 yards, and three scores via the passing game during that same timeframe. The Wisconsin product was named to the Pro Bowl in both 2016 and 2018.
Minor NFL Transactions: 8/21/19
We’ll keep track of today’s minor moves here:
Cleveland Browns
- Signed: WR Braxton Miller
- Waived: TE Mik’Quan Deane
New Orleans Saints
- Signed: OL Fisayo Awolaja
- Waived: LS Nick Moore
Seattle Seahawks
- Signed: OT Brian Wallace
- Waived: S Jalen Harvey
Saints’ Chris Clark Done For Year
This was not how Chris Clark envisioned things going with the Saints. On Wednesday, the Saints announced that the offensive lineman will be out for the season and placed on injured reserve.
Just last week, the Saints inked the NFC South vet to a free agent deal. He was set to compete for one of the Saints’ jobs behind starters Terron Armstead and Ryan Ramczyk and battle with Marshall Newhouse and Michael Ola, but he’ll be shelved for a while after being carted off the field in Sunday’s preseason game.
Without Clark, the Saints can be expected to explore offensive line help once again. Unfortunately, they won’t have much time to vet any of their additions before the start of the season.
Saints To Sign LB Will Compton
The Saints have agreed to sign free agent linebacker Will Compton (Twitter link via John Keim of ESPN.com). Terms of the deal are not yet known. 
[RELATED: Saints Sign T Chris Clark]
Compton played for the Redskins from 2013-17 and was a full-time starter as recently as 2016. However, his 2017 was marred by injury and he played only 79 defensive snaps for the Titans last year in his first and only season in Tennessee.
With the Saints, he may be able to provide depth, experience, and special teams help. However, he has limited time to make his case before 53-man roster cuts in early September.
Dolphins To Sign Jakeem Grant To Extension
The Dolphins have agreed to a four-year contract extension with wide receiver Jakeem Grant, a source tells Adam Beasley of the Miami Herald (Twitter link). The deal will keep Grant under club control through 2023.
The fresh deal will be worth up to $24MM, a source tells Ian Rapoport of NFL.com (on Twitter). That means Grant will make just $6MM per year, despite having only 34 career catches for 471 yards across three seasons.
Grant is, at best, the No. 4 wide receiver on Miami’s depth chart at the moment, but most of his value comes from his return ability. The 2016 sixth-rounder has returned 59 punts and 58 kickoffs over his first three years in the league, and he took a punt and a kickoff to the house last year. The 16.3 yards-per-return he provided across 14 punt returns in 2018 is a stellar mark, as was his 29.7 yards-per return average on kickoffs.
The Texas Tech product is diminutive, checking in at 5-7, 171. But he is shifty and quick, and those skills do allow him to be an occasional threat in the passing game as well. He has two receiving touchdowns in each of the past two seasons, with a 65-yard strike in 2017 and a 52-yard score in 2018.
Grant had been battling a hamstring injury that kept him sidelined over the past several weeks, but he returned to practice Monday, and the Dolphins apparently believe he is back to full health. His rookie contract expires at the end of the 2019 season.
Jets To Sign Stephone Anthony
The Jets are signing linebacker Stephone Anthony, according to Ian Rapoport of NFL.com (via Twitter). Anthony was cut by the Falcons on Saturday.
New York has been seeking a replacement for Avery Williamson, who tore his ACL last week. The club signed Albert McClellan on Saturday, and Anthony gives them a higher-upside option.
Anthony, whom the Saints selected in the first round of the 2015 draft, showed some promise with a 112-tackle rookie campaign. He started all 16 games that year for a bottom-tier New Orleans defense, but the team moved him from middle linebacker to strongside linebacker in 2016, and he regressed considerably. The Saints dealt him to the Dolphins in 2017, but the change of scenery didn’t do much for him. Anthony had just seven tackles across 16 appearances last year, and the Dolphins declined his fifth-year option, making him a free agent this offseason.
The Falcons signed him at the end of July, but he did not last a full month on Atlanta’s roster. With the Jets, Anthony will have a chance to compete for playing time alongside free agent acquisition C.J. Mosley, and he will also reunite with Adam Gase, his head coach for two years in Miami, and Joe Vitt, the Saints’ LB coach during Anthony’s first two years in the league.
The Jets cut safety Santos Ramirez in a corresponding move.
Chargers To Sign Dontrelle Inman
The Chargers have signed wide receiver Dontrelle Inman, as Ian Rapoport of NFL.com reports (via Twitter). This will be a homecoming for Inman, who played for the Chargers from 2014-16 and for the first quarter of 2017 before the Bolts traded him to the Bears.
Inman, 30, became a free agent after the 2017 season and did not sign with a club until October 2018, when he joined the Colts. He caught 28 passes for 304 yards and three scores for Indy, and he added another eight grabs for 108 yards in the club’s two postseason contests. Advanced metrics were fond of his work, and he has always been a solid contributor when given the opportunity. His best season, which featured 810 yards and four TDs, came with the 2016 Chargers.
The UVA product signed with the Patriots in May but requested his release shortly after Josh Gordon was reinstated. He generated interest from the Lions and Jets, but Rapoport says the chance to reunite with Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers ended up being the deciding factor. However, RapSheet says in a separate tweet that the Jets made a “very strong offer” to Inman, and that the veteran wideout was impressed with the New York outfit.
Inman should see a fair amount of action, especially if Keenan Allen — who is expected to miss the remainder of Los Angeles’ preseason slate — is forced to miss any regular season action. Even if Allen stays healthy, Inman currently looks like the No. 3 or No. 4 option on the Chargers’ WR depth chart.
Jets Claim S Derrick Kindred
The Jets have claimed Derrick Kindred off waivers from the Colts, as Field Yates of ESPN.com tweets. This marks the second time in 2019 that Kindred has been plucked from the waiver wire.
Kindred, who was selected by the Browns in the fourth round of the 2016 draft, was waived by Cleveland on April 1. The Colts claimed him but elected to cut ties yesterday after rostering him for nearly five months.
The Jets have elected to give the TCU product a chance, and they liked him enough to put themselves on the hook for his $2MM 2019 salary. While the club has Marcus Maye and Jamal Adams entrenched at the safety positions, Kindred could provide quality depth there, especially since Maye was only recently removed from the PUP list. Theoretically, Kindred could also see some action at corner — which is currently a glaring weakness for Gang Green — and he is likely to be deployed on special teams as well.
Kindred appeared in 42 games over three years in Cleveland. Last year, he had a perfect attendance record and registered 45 tackles, one interception, and a forced fumble. In New York, he will reunite with Gregg Williams, who served as the Browns’ defensive coordinator in 2017 and the first part of 2018 before taking over as the club’s interim head coach.
The Jets waived DB Montrel Meander in a corresponding move.
Cowboys Sign Jaylon Smith To Extension
The Cowboys have reached a long-term extension with linebacker Jaylon Smith, sources tell Ian Rapoport and Mike Garafolo of NFL.com (on Twitter). Smith has been vocal about his desire for a new deal, and he’s got one in place with days to go before the regular season.
Clarence E. Hill Jr. of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that it’s a five-year, $64MM pact (Twitter link), but that doesn’t really tell the whole story. Smith was under contract for about $1.3MM this year and would have been eligible for a restricted free agent tender in 2020, and the extension did not subsume those amounts. So, as Todd Archer of ESPN.com tweets, Smith is now playing under a seven-year, $69.7MM deal, and Smith will be under club control through 2025. David Moore of the Dallas Morning News tweets that the extension does include $35.5MM in guaranteed money, but it looks like a fairly team-friendly pact overall.
Still, it’s a good day for Smith, who recently said that he never wants to play for another team. “I want to be a Cowboy. I want to be a Cowboy for the rest of my life,” Smith said last week. “Understanding what they’ve done for me, taking a chance, taking a risk. Now they’re getting the return on their investment. It’s a beautiful thing to be a Dallas Cowboy.”
Indeed, the Cowboys took a gamble on Smith by selecting him in the second round of the 2016 draft. When he was healthy at Notre Dame, Smith was viewed as a top 10 pick. However, severe knee injuries caused his stock to plummet. At the time, it was speculated that Smith could drop like a stone due to medical concerns, but the Cowboys rolled the dice and pounced on him with the No. 34 overall choice.
Smith missed all of 2016 and played mostly as a part-timer in 2017. Then, last year, he came back with a vengeance. Smith graded as the league’s No. 6 off-ball linebacker last season, per Pro Football Focus, making a career-high 121 tackles and registering four sacks. Between Smith and 2018 first-rounder Leighton Vander Esch (No. 4 on PFF’s 2018 linebacker performance list), the Cowboys have one of the NFL’s best three-down linebacking duos.
Of course, there’s still plenty of work for the Cowboys in the coming days with Dak Prescott, Ezekiel Elliott, and Amari Cooper all eligible for extensions.