Boston Herald:

Boston police said they are also probing a possible link to Hernandez in the unsolved July 2012 drive-by killings of Safiro Furtado and Danny Abreu, both of Dorchester. The two pals were leaving a Theatre District nightclub July 15, 2012, when they were ambushed and sprayed with gunfire from a gray or silver SUV with Rhode Island plates at the intersection of Shawmut Avenue and Herald Street.

Boston police were back at Hernandez’s North Attleboro home last night executing a new search linked to the double murder.

Evidence against Hernandez continued to mount yesterday as Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Bill McCauley said investigators found a .45 caliber clip in Hernandez’s Hummer at his Franklin condominium. Authorities say Lloyd was coldly gunned down with a .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun just before 3:30 a.m. June 17 on a dark, gravel road about a half-mile from Hernandez’s house.

McCauley also referred to a widely circulated picture on the Internet of Hernandez posing with a Glock .45 and said, “There’s good reason to believe that the firearm that killed Mr. Lloyd was a Glock.”

Authorities also charged Carlos Ortiz, 27, with illegally possessing a gun at Hernandez’s home on the morning of the murder. Ortiz is from Hernandez’s hometown of Bristol, Conn.

Also last night, police issued a wanted poster for one of Hernandez’s alleged accomplices, Ernest Wallace, 41, who was called “armed and dangerous.”

Via USA Today: Court clerk: No arrest warrant issued for Aaron Hernandez.

Or anybody else yet for that matter.

Updates to follow.

I guess turning over his smashed cell phone and home-security system were a red-flag of sorts to the police: 

New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez is now the subject of an arrest warrant drawn up on obstruction of justice charges based on the possible destruction of evidence in connection with the shooting death of his friend, ABC News has learned.

Police sources told ABC News on Thursday that a major investigative tool – the security system at Hernandez’s home, which included video – had been intentionally destroyed. His cell phone was handed over to police “in pieces,” and appeared to have been smashed.

Police also want to know why a team of house cleaners were hired on Monday to scrub Hernandez’s mansion, the sources said.

Evidence is mounting that Hernandez and the victim, Odin Lloyd, 27, a semi-pro football player, had been together at several nightclubs during the course of the weekend, including the night before Lloyd’s body was found, several law enforcement sources told ABC News.

You know, Tim Tebow might make a pretty good tight end. . .

Matt Birk, you’ve just won the Super Bowl — what are you going to do? Not go to the White House and meet the man who said, “God bless Planned Parenthood,” that’s what:

Retired six-time Pro Bowl center and former Viking Matt Birk skipped the Baltimore Ravens’ visit to the White House on Wednesday for political reasons.

Specifically, the St. Paul native took issue with President Barack Obama’s support of Planned Parenthood.

Birk is a staunch Catholic father of six children who’s against abortion and has taken a strong pro-life stance. Birk has also spoken out in the past in favor of traditional marriage prior to same-sex marriage becoming legal last year in Maryland.

“I wasn’t there,” Birk said in an interview on KFAN-FM. “I would say that I have great respect for the office of the presidency, but about five or six weeks ago, our President made a comment in a speech and he said, ‘God bless Planned Parenthood.’ 

The rest here.

Via USA Today.

What I liked: The top two picks were offensive linemen, the first seven and 18 total first-rounders were either offensive or defensive linemen. 

What I didn’t like: E. J. Manuel, QB from Florida State, to the Bills.

And as for my Raiders: D. J. Hayden’s miraculous recovery from heart surgery is one of the better stories I’ve read this year. He’s been medicaly cleared to play and he’s fast. And the best news is this gives the Raiders a second-round pick (which they gave away in the idiotic deal to get Carson Palmer last year.)

Obligatory Manti Te’o comment: Not drafted on Day 1. His imaginary girlfriend has already cost him possibly millions in first-round dollars, but he should get drafted today and we’ll see just how much damage was done.

Tonight’s coverage starts tonight at 6:30 pm.

Tune in tonight at 8 pm!

Until then, here are some links for your Thursday-afternoon reading. . .

Mock drafts from NFL.com.

Oakland is recycling President Obama’s election strategy for the draft: HOPE.

Who will draft Manti Te’o?

Best and worst of the new NFL uniforms.

What’s a draft without the obligatory posts on the Wonderlic test. . .

A seven.

Blame colleges for low Wonderlic scores!

Don’t judge a player by his Wonderlic.

Jimmy Kimmel gets fans to opine on fictional draft prospects.

The year of the OT.

Rumors.

And finally. . .

“A preview of the worst NFL Draft in the history of the world.”

On second thought, maybe I won’t watch tonight.

Miami Herald:

Just another ho-hum, typical offseason Wednesday for the Dolphins.

They announced new concessions on the stadium deal. They signed offensive guard Lance Louis. And they made general manager Jeff Ireland and CEO Mike Dee available to season-ticket holders to discuss anything they wanted.

Didn’t matter. It was all logo, all the time in Miami.

The day after confirming that the logo leaked in recent weeks was indeed the real deal, the Dolphins embraced the local and national notoriety.

They even sent Jared Odrick to a community event wearing an off-the-rack T-shirt, with the sleek — albeit controversial — new design. Fans took to Twitter to praise or harangue the new look; Dee acknowledged the reaction was mixed.

But the extreme makeover got the thumbs-up from two respected voices: Don Shula and Dan Marino.

“Glad to see new logo has all the same colors from our great 70’s & 80’s teams. A new look for a new era,” Shula tweeted. . .

It looks like a spaceship if you ask me, but I like it better than the old one:

ABC 10 Miami-Ft. Lauderdale reports:

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office arrested Miami Dolphins legend Mark “Super” Duper, who investigators say punched, body slammed, and choked a teenage boy, knocking him unconscious.

Police arrested Duper, 54, Wednesday and charged him with child abuse.

According to an arrest affidavit, the incident happened Tuesday at a home in Jacksonville.

While playing video games with a friend’s children, Duper got into an argument with the victim when the boy refused to pick his hat off the floor, police say.

Duper then punched the boy in the face and slammed him to the ground several times, causing him to lose consciousness, police say.

The rest here.

Maybe they can draft Manti T’eo to fill the void?

Details of the Bears’ move here.

Seems like it worked out OK for him:

Who cares about the Super Bowl when it’s duck-hunting season?

That’s what “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson believes. He turned down a chance to play in the NFL to pursue his real passion: hunting. That later led to the formation of his business selling duck calls and other gear, which in turn led to his family being spotlighted on the A&E reality series.

Back in the late ’60s, Robertson was a quarterback at Louisiana Tech, starting ahead of a guy named Terry Bradshaw — who would later become a Hall of Famer with four Super Bowl rings.

As detailed in Sports Illustrated, Robertson turned down an offer from the Washington Redskins his junior year to concentrate on duck hunting.

“Throwing a touchdown pass to a guy running down the sideline, and he runs down with the ball for six, it was fun,” he reminisces. “However, in my case, it was much more fun to be standing down in some flooded timber with about 35 or 40 mallard ducks comin’ down on top of me in the woods. That did my heart more good than all the football in the world.”

Bradshaw recalls Robertson as someone who loved hunting more than football. In his autobiography, “It’s Only a Game,” the legendary quarterback wrote, “He’d come to practice directly from the woods, squirrel tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes. Clearly he was a fine shot, so no one complained too much.”

In summary, the stress of his fake girlfriend dying helped him have a stellar season, but the stress of the combine got to him and that explains his slow 40 time? 

Former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o has refused to blame his poor performance during the BCS national title game on the stress resulting from the knowledge that, inevitably, the story of his fake dead girlfriend would be exposed.

On Monday, Te’o blamed his poor performance during the 40-yard dash on the overall stress of the Scouting Combine.

“I was running near a 4.6, a 4.5,” Te’o told NFL Network after officially clocking a 4.82-second 40-yard dash. “Today was just a long, long day.”

Te’o called the Combine a “very exhausting process,” explaining that he got to bed late and got up early, with roughly four hours of sleep per night.

via the Washington Post:

Daniel Snyder owns the Washington Redskins, but even he couldn’t change the team’s name without a complicated, and possibly lengthy, process that might include winning approval from both the NFL and some of its many sponsors, according to experts on the way the nation’s most prosperous sports league conducts its affairs.

The financial stakes in such a move by one of pro football’s most valuable franchises would be considerable for the 32 NFL owners, who have a revenue-sharing agreement that covers much of the more than $9 billion the league generates annually.

“The unique dynamic of professional sports is that teams essentially give up some of their rights as far as names and trademarks to the league as part of the joint venture,” said Gabriel Feldman, director of the sports law program at Tulane University. “While an individual team owner makes business decisions primarily affecting the one team, there are also decisions made by the league and the other owners that tend to affect the league as a whole.”

The Redskins have made it clear that they have no intention of changing the team’s name or logo, despite recent criticism from Native Americans, the media and others that both are racially offensive and should be abandoned. The Redskins have said they don’t mean to offend anyone and are proud of the team’s history and traditions.

But the fierce debate has glossed over both the financial implications of a name change and the procedural issues that would be involved. All of those considerations would be significant, people familiar with the situation and outside legal and business experts said.

According to two people with knowledge of the NFL’s policies on such matters, the league exerts great control over the use of trademarked team names, logos and colors.

One of those people, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said he presumes the NFL would take the position that team names are set by the league constitution and any name change would require league approval.

Enjoy.

Now that Ray Lewis has delivered his final inspirational rant and done his last squirrel dance, it’s time for armchair scribes like me to assess the Ravens legend’s place in history. In doing a quick postmortem on Lewis’s Hall of Fame career, I’m going to set aside the double murder and deer-antler spray and focus on his accomplishments and accolades, which are legion: ten All-Pro selections, two NFL Defensive Player of the Year Awards, 227 starts, sole membership in history’s 40-sack–30-inteception club. I’m one of those people who will actually cop to being a Lewis fan, so don’t take this as garden-variety anti-Ray bias, but I’m not ready to anoint him history’s greatest defender. Lewis is the perfect backer for the soundbite era, but in terms of the linebacking Mt. Olympus, he’s merely one of many immortals.

For all of his 17 seasons, he’s been standing and woofing on the shoulders of giants. In the 1960s, Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke redefined middle-linebacker play with their relentlessness and unbridled aggression. Nitschke was the heart and soul of five NFL championship defenses for the Packers and, like Lewis, was a two-time Super Bowl winner. Butkus merely set the standard by which all backers are measured, earning All-Pro honors six times.

In 1970, Butkus had possibly the greatest season any linebacker has ever enjoyed: 132 tackles, 84 assists, three interceptions, and two fumble recoveries. Those 216 combined stops are 33 more than Lewis’s career-best 183. The Steelers’ Jack Lambert took up the mantle in the 1970s, averaging 146 tackles per season through his first ten seasons and greeting each ball carrier with the gentle temperament of a rabid honey badger. With his fearsome gap-toothed scowl, Lambert embodied the blue-collar attitude of the Steel Curtain, perhaps history’s greatest defense.

The 1980s brought the heir to Butkus’s throne in fellow Bear Mike Singletary, the man in the middle of the angry, intimidating Chicago defense. Scouring the field with the scariest eyes in football history, Samurai Mike was a ten-time Pro Bowler and, like Lewis, a two-time Defensive Player of the Year. And I haven’t even mentioned the outside backers. Lawrence Taylor single-handedly revolutionized the sport; Jack Ham had 53 career takeaways to Lewis’s 50; and Derrick Thomas was a quarterback-terrorizing machine during his Hall of Fame career.

One final factoid should take Lewis down a peg: In 14 seasons as a starter, linebacker London Fletcher has averaged more tackles, sacks, and forced fumbles per season than Ray-Ray, but he’s done so quietly and professionally; as a result, nobody’s nominating Fletcher for GOAT. Lewis is a legend, but let’s set aside his peculiar genius for self-promotion and stipulate that he’s got plenty of company in the defensive football pantheon

— Rob Doster is senior editor for Athlon Sports.

Personally I think people spend too much time discussing the importance of the halftime show. 

For example, the New York Times gushed with this headline,

Beyoncé Silences Doubters With Intensity at Halftime

What doubters? Everybody knows she can sing. She’s the one who doubted her ability during the inauguration. I was just making fun of her for faking the national anthem with, you know, the entire world watching. The issue is life’s gotten to the point where even the most important events need to be staged to give an appearance of perfection. What if Beyoncé had sung live and had her voice seize up because of the cold? So what? Life goes on. 

And nothing emphasized that life goes on better last night than when after Beyoncé gave her performance, the Super Dome blew a fuse — or something — and the entire staged production was put on hold. Well, that’s how life works.

The game, which until then had been a rather boring blowout, went on to finish as one of the most exciting Super Bowls in recent memory. You can try to stage things all you want, but in the end it’s the reality that people remember. 

As for Beyoncé, she’s joined a long list of marching bands, singers beyond their prime, and Up With People as headliners of the halftime show. 

But since the halftime show has become a ratings event unto itself, it’s on to New York City for the 2014 Super Bowl where halftime producers not only have to come up with a better show than Beyoncé, but deal with weather related issues as well. Good luck with that. 

New York Post:

Dan Marino is famous for his touchdowns — but the Hall of Famer’s scoring off the field is downright shocking.

The married gridiron great — a pregame analyst for CBS since 2003 who will be doing this Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast — sired a love child with a network underling and then paid her millions to keep quiet, sources have exclusively told The Post. . . .

She gave birth to their daughter, Chloe, in June 2005.

“They had an affair, and she had a baby,” said a source. “Everything was on the down-low and secretive.”

News of the affair and child comes as Marino is set to work Sunday’s big “Super Bowl Today” telecast. . . .

Marino yesterday admitted to his dalliance.

The rest here.

Ray Lewis denies using this traditional Chinese medicine to heal from his torn triceps:

Ray Lewis returned to Super Bowl media day with another controversy: allegations of cheating.

According to Sports Illustrated, the iconic Baltimore Ravens linebacker tried to obtain deer-antler velvet extract in an attempt to speed the healing for a torn triceps that sidelined him for more than half the season.

Lewis approached the makers of the deer-antler velvet extract — Sports with Alternative to Steroids — the company’s owner Mitch Ross told SI. Deer-antler spray contains IGF-1, which is on the NFL’s list of banned substances. Using the spray would be a violation of the NFL’s steroids policy.

During a podium session packed with news media, Lewis dismissed the story.

“Two years ago, that was the same report,” he said. “It’s not worthy of the press.”

When asked directly whether he had used the spray during his recovery this season, Lewis said, “Nah, never.”

Whatever happened to normal, plain-old steroids?

Via Yahoo! Sports:

Since retiring, Pittsburgh Steelers legend Hines Ward has kept busy as a studio analyst for NBC’s “Football Night in America.”

He also has spent some time as a corpse risen from his grave.

Thanks to the connections of a college teammate who now acts on “The Walking Dead,” Ward will appear in a future episode of AMC’s hit show about zombies. He will be a zombie extra, and as the picture above shows, some magic was performed with his make up.

It worked so well that Ward even scared himself:

“Just being in makeup preparing me for my role was cool. I actually scared myself when I looked in the mirror for the first time after,” Ward told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Here’s a great piece from Sunday’s New York Post on the little-talked-about murder tied to Ray Lewis and his friends in 2000:

As much as the NFL loves a redemption narrative, the story of Ray Lewis is one that you probably won’t be hearing anything about next Sunday night. Lewis himself has made it clear that he will never address it again: “Really,” he told a reporter this month. “Really. Why would I talk about that?”

On the evening of Jan. 30, 2000, Ray Lewis was looking to party. He had flown to Atlanta to watch Super Bowl XXXIV and booked himself into the luxury Georgian hotel. He’d also brought along his personal driver, Duane Fassett, to chauffeur a stretch Lincoln Navigator: 37 feet long, 14 seats, $3,000 a day.

On this night, Lewis turned himself out: white-and-black suit, full-length black mink coat and what would later be described as “enough rock to break the bank.” A few nights earlier, he had met a gorgeous woman named Jessica Robertson at a party thrown by Magic Johnson, and it was she — not Lewis’ pregnant fiancée — who was his date for the evening.

What Lewis and his crew were doing before they arrived at around 1 a.m. at the Cobalt Club, in Atlanta’s party-centric Buckhead district, remains unclear. The Cobalt had a blue neon glow and a V.V.I.P room. Baseball star David Justice had been there earlier, as had Tony Gonzalez, then of the Kansas City Chiefs, but Lewis held court on the first floor, near the door, so everyone would notice. . . .

“Smooth” was how Lewis would later describe his mood at Cobalt; he’d had four Rémy Martin cognacs while luxuriating in the attention of half-dressed women and an ever-expanding entourage. He was 24 years old and had a four-year contract worth $26 million. He had just dropped more than $100,000 shopping, and the necklace he was wearing — a gold door-stopper studded with diamonds– was one of his recent acquisitions.

The rest here.

As long as your hot cocoa at the game is less than 16 ounces, I assume. NBC Sports:

Roger Goodell says the NFL is ready for another Ice Bowl.

A year from now, when the Super Bowl is played in New Jersey, it will mark the first time that the game has been played outdoors in a cold climate. But Goodell said at a New York City press conference today that bad weather won’t be a problem.

“We’re going to embrace the weather, embrace New York and New Jersey,” Goodell said, via the New York Daily News. “We are also prepared for all alternatives, and that includes the weather, and the potential for snow and ice.”

The NFL was faced with a string of logistical problems when an ice storm shut down roads in Dallas during Super Bowl week two years ago, although the game itself was played indoors. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said his city will be well prepared for the weather during all the pre-Super Bowl activities, and he endorsed football being played in the elements.

“That’s football, it’s meant to be played outdoors,” Bloomberg said.

The rest here.