NEW ORLEANS — Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Mike Evans has been suspended without pay for one game for his role in Sunday’s altercation with New Orleans Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore, the NFL announced Monday.
Evans was suspended for violating the unsportsmanlike conduct and unnecessary roughness rules, the league said. Evans will not be eligible to return until after Sunday’s opener against the Green Bay Packers.
Evans can appeal the suspension under the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement. If he appeals, the hearing will be before Derrick Brooks or James Thrash, who have been jointly appointed by the league and the NFL Players Association to rule on player discipline appeals on the field.
Evans plans to appeal the suspension, sources told ESPN. The hearing is likely to take place this week.
In a letter to Evans, NFL vice president of football operations Jon Runyan wrote, “After a play was completed, you were walking toward your sideline. When you noticed your teammates ‘confronted with the Saints players, you ran to that area on the field and threw your body violently and hit an unsuspecting opponent who was part of that confrontation. You knocked your opponent to the ground and it occurred a hand-to-hand combat involving players from both teams. Your aggressive conduct could have caused serious injury to your opponent and clearly does not reflect the high standards of sportsmanship expected of a professional.”
Rule 13, Section 2, Article 8(g) prohibits “unnecessarily running, diving, cutting or throwing the body at or on a player who is out of play or who should not have reasonably anticipated such contact by ‘an opponent, before or after the ball is dead’.
Rule 12, Section 3, Article 1 prohibits any act that is “contrary to generally understood principles of sportsmanship.”
No other players were suspended by the NFL on Monday.
This was not Evans’ first suspension for a fight with Lattimore. In 2017, Evans was suspended for one game for running onto the field and pushing Lattimore in the back.
On Sunday, Evans said he believed Lattimore punched running back Leonard Fournette in the face and shoved quarterback Tom Brady. He said he wasn’t worried about being suspended because he felt 2017 was a more egregious violation of the rules and he wasn’t sent off at the time. But the NFL takes repeat violations into account.
“He punched my partner in the face. I just pushed him to the ground,” Evans said. “I was just trying to get my mate’s back. All I saw was him punch somebody in the face. I said, ‘I’m not going to let that happen.'”
In 2020, Lattimore was fined $10,500 for unnecessary roughness for pushing Evans in the back, prompting Evans to remove his helmet.
If Evans’ suspension stands, it would further deplete a receiving corps already dealing with multiple injuries. The Buccaneers played without Chris Godwin and Julio Jones on Sunday.
“We don’t want any fighting in our game because we lose a good player. It doesn’t help our team. We don’t realize it. We don’t teach it in our game,” Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles said Monday. .
“The fight alone – lose a player for the next game, it hurts our team because we lose a very good ball player. We don’t want it, we don’t realize it. We have to move forward and try to find a way to win without him. This should be a lesson for all our players,” he added.
Evans has been a team captain for the Bucs since 2017 and has been one of the Bucs’ most valuable players in franchise history since being selected seventh overall in the 2014 NFL Draft. He is the only player in the NFL history to record 1,000 receiving yards in each of his first eight seasons. Evans watched the game in the locker room and greeted his teammates, including Brady, with a hug or handshake in the tunnel after the win.
Asked how players can draw the line between defending teammates and crossing into unintended territory, Bowles said, “It’s always a fine line. This is a game of controlled aggression. .. You try to protect your teammates, but you have to do it the right way.”