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Long-time Fantasy Football Index favorite Tatum Bell has been involved in what appears to be the best NFL off-field story since Onterrio Smith got caught an airport with a “Whizzinator” (a prosthetic penis for beating drug tests).
Pro Football Talk reports that the Bell stole two suitcases belonging to Rudi Johnson when Johnson was in town to try out for the Lions..
Writes Mike Florio:
A strange thing happened to running back Rudi Johnson when he visited with the Detroit Lions on Monday.
Someone stole his stuff.
Seriously.
Specifically, and as we’re told by a reliable source Johnson left his bags outside CEO Matt Millen’s office while he met with team officials and, ultimately, worked out a deal with the team.
So when Johnson came back to get his bags, they were nowhere to be found. Johnson and Millen were stumped.
Enter the eye in the sky.
The team checked the videotapes generated by the team’s in-house surveillance system, and they quickly identified the culprit.
So who might it have been? None other than Tatum Bell, who lost his gig with the Lions after Rudi arrived.
Per the source, Bell took the bags to the house of a female acquaintance. When confronted on the matter, Bell offered up some cockamamie story that he thought the bags belonged to someone he knew. The girl, however, said that she hadn’t seen Bell in several months and he showed up out of the blue and asked her to keep the bags for a while.
Johnson has retrieved the bags, and it’s our understanding that charges won’t be pressed.
Tatum apparently didn’t know that he was being monitored.
The story can be accessed at www.profootballtalk.com.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Bell today is claiming that he didn’t steal the bags but thought they belonged to a different player who was released by the Lions, Victor DeGrate.
“If you look on film, I wasn’t in no hurry or nothing. I was just going about my day,” Bell says in today’s Detroit Free Press. “I tried to talk to Rudi yesterday, but he was pretty upset, so I let it go. So now it’s that I’m being a thief. I come to found out that the bags weren’t whose I thought they was. It was just an honest mistake, man.”
Bell did not address the issues of why he would think the bags belonged to DeGrate, why DeGrate would have left them at the team facility, or why DeGrate would want them left at the woman’s house.
Rudi Johnson says that the bags were returned, but that some things, including money, were missing.
“All of this happened after he got released and came in and got some stuff out of his locker,” Johnson said. “That’s when he scooped the bags up, some real shyster, conniving stuff.”
—Ian Allan
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Posted by Andy Karr | Sep. 03 at 02:05 PM
This vaults Tatum Bell into the Insane Running Backs Pantheon with Onterio "Whizzinator" Smith, Najeh Daven"poop" and the one and only Lawrence Phillips.
Posted by David Allen | Sep. 03 at 04:34 PM
To paraphrase (I wish I still had the updates) "We like Tatum Bell......." ~Ian Allan- FFI I took him 1st round....DOH!!!!!!
Posted by Keith Colhoun | Sep. 03 at 10:07 PM
As if Tatum Bell didn't comw with enough baggage already.