Report: Browns were willing to deal No. 4 overall pick, more for Jimmy Garoppolo

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By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin LONDON (Reuters) - In a swipe at his hardline rivals, President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday young Iranian protesters were unhappy about far more than just the economy and they would no longer defer to the views and lifestyle of an aging revolutionary elite. The pragmatic cleric, who defeated anti-Western hardliners to win re-election last year, also called for the lifting of curbs on social media used by anti-government protesters in the most sustained challenge to conservative authorities since 2009. "It would be a misrepresentation (of events) and also an insult to Iranian people to say they only had economic demands," Rouhani was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

Draymond Green is rarely shy with his opinions, and his latest candid thoughts on NBA officiating have cost him $25,000.

The NBA fined Green on Monday for criticizing officials on Saturday, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports.

The NBA has fined Golden State's Draymond Green $25K for ripping officials on Saturday night. — Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) January 8, 2018

The Golden State Warriors forward picked up his league-leading 11th technical foul on Saturday for arguing with an official in a win over the Los Angeles Clippers, leaving him five shy of an automatic suspension.

Green ripped into officials after the game over what he views as personal vendettas referees have with players.

“It’s bad,” Green told The Athletic. “It’s horrible. It’s really bad. I don’t know why it is. But I think it’s ridiculous. It’s ruining the game. … It should be one of, if not the main priority, to be solved. It definitely should.

“They can get a new crop (of referees), a whole new crop. Too many personal things going on. Too much me against you. It just don’t work that way.”

The NBA has fined Draymond Green for criticizing officials on Saturday. (Getty)

Warriors teammate Stephen Curry walked a fine line when asked about Green’s relationship with officials, but said that he does believe that Green is sometimes treated unfairly.

Steph Curry on Draymond’s technicals and if he gets an unfair shake pic.twitter.com/ajHPGXduOR — Mark Medina (@MarkG_Medina) January 8, 2018

“He has a certain kind of mannerism about him, a certain disposition that is different than other people,” Curry said. “I’ve been on the court where you’re just looking around like why did he get a tech? He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything demonstrative. I’ve seen way worse kind of had a blind eye turned to it.”

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Another layer of the onion from the bombshell ESPN report on discord in the New England Patriots organization got peeled away Monday.

The Cleveland Browns were willing to deal the No. 4 overall pick in the upcoming NFL draft “and other goodies” to the Patriots for Jimmy Garoppolo, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports.

The Patriots ended up dealing Garoppolo two days after the Browns reached out to negotiate, the report details. The Patriots told the Browns that Garoppolo wasn’t available for trade.

Yahoo Sports’ Charles Robinson backed up the report’s assertion.

I asked one of Belichick’s guys about this shortly after the trade. Was told in no uncertain terms would Bill ever deal Jimmy to the #Browns. Not in 100 years. https://t.co/VlvOMQQ3B6 — Charles Robinson (@CharlesRobinson) January 8, 2018

In the end, the Patriots didn’t negotiate with anyone other than the 49ers, according to the report.

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick speaks to quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo before a game in October. (Getty)

The ESPN report detailed that the Garoppolo deal with the 49ers resulted as a “clear mandate” from team owner Robert Kraft to head coach Bill Belichick, who was reluctant to part with his prized backup quarterback.

Kraft denied this report.

“I assumed once the season started, we’d talk again at the end of the season about it,” Kraft told The MMQB. “The next time I spoke with Bill about it was the Monday before the trade deadline. He called me on that Monday and said he got a deal with San Francisco, Jimmy for a second-round pick and [quarterback] Brian Hoyer. Turns out they had to cut Hoyer and then we got him. But really, this was basically a second-round pick and Brian Hoyer for Jimmy. Bill asked me if I was OK with this. I was really taken aback a little bit. I wanted to think about it. I talked to Jonathan, who was okay with it, and I called Bill back and said, ‘OK.’”

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Regardless, with Tom Brady still playing at an MVP level and Garoppolo approaching the end of his contract, the Patriots had a decision to make, and they stuck with Brady.

If they truly turned down a chance at the first-round pick the Browns had acquired from the Houston Texans only to accept a considerably less valuable second-round pick from San Francisco, it’s a head-scratcher.

The Patriots have won five Super Bowls in seven appearances during the Brady/Belichick era in large part because they almost always get the better end of transactions. That they wouldn’t negotiate with the Browns or any team other than the 49ers is a stunner and out of character for a normally shrewd organization.

ATLANTA — In the two hours before the national championship kicked off, wind whipped rain through the streets of downtown Atlanta. Several dozen protesters posted up in front of CNN’s world headquarters, chanting and holding sopping-wet posters. Not far away, several thousand fans shivered in the rain, waiting in lines long enough to virtually encircle Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

The cause of both their circumstances, President Donald Trump, arrived on the scene shortly before 7 p.m. Eastern, and some fans — who had been forced to wait for well over an hour in the rain — weren’t happy:

They locked down @MBStadium for @realDonaldTrump an hour ago and myself and a thousand fans have been waiting in the rain to get in. Let’s just say there were plenty of boos when Trump arrived pic.twitter.com/6XIr8YO5gO — Andy Scholes (@AndyScholesCNN) January 8, 2018

The Secret Service had locked down all routes around the stadium, and tightly controlled all entrances, as is standard procedure for any president. But that wasn’t much comfort for the fans who waited in lines that stretched for as much as a quarter-mile. Decked in every possible combination of red and black, houndstooth for the ‘Bama fans and bulldog caricatures for the Georgia ones, fans dealt with the delays as best they could: some with blank looks, some with cheers, and some with streams of profanity. None moved the line any faster.

[Yahoo Store: Get your Alabama Crimson Tide championship gear right here!]

A Mercedes Benz Stadium official confirmed to Yahoo Sports that Gate 1, one of the key entrance points into the stadium, was shut down for 45 minutes because of the president’s arrival at an adjacent entrance, forcing fans to go to much smaller gates. The ripple effect of the shutdown meant that waits at one gate just 20 minutes before kickoff were as long as 25 minutes, while another gate had almost no wait at all…but fans didn’t want to risk leaving one and possibly end up in an even longer line. (Average wait time for a similar-sized crowd to get into Falcons games, per stadium officials, is four to five minutes per gate.)

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All along the line, T-shirt sellers, cooler-toting salesmen, and ticket scalpers darted in and out, hustling and peddling. Get-in price for tickets was in the range of $800 for standing room and as low as $1,100 an hour before the game — if, that is, the tickets were legit. T-shirt salesmen, meanwhile, slung T-shirts that ranged from defiant (“[Female dog] I’m from the Dirty South”) to profane (“Hell [expletive]-ing Yeah”) to clearly unlicensed (“ROLE TIDE ROLE”). And for 10 bucks, any of them could have been yours.

Half a mile away, in front of CNN’s headquarters, about 50 to 75 protesters chanted in the downpour. Whether you see them as the fearless resistance or annoying sore losers probably depends on how you voted in November 2016, and the protesters heard a bit of both as they chanted, “Donald Trump has got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho!” and “No! More! Trump! No! More! Trump!”

Off in the distance, you could hear the strains of “Semi-Charmed Life” and “Centuries,” and on the other side of a window at McCormick & Schmick’s, Charles Barkley sat with a private party and cast an occasional eye at the protests. A giant inflatable beer bottle and Dunkin Donuts coffee cup didn’t exactly add to the political atmosphere.

Most of the passing fans were less interested in civic debate than they were in getting somewhere dry, but a few decided to engage. The results were, shall we say, somewhat less dignified than Ciceronian debate.

“You must be poor!” shouted one fan in response to the chants.

“White privilege [posterior body part]!” a protester shot back.

“Put away your [expletive] signs!” another fan shouted, and the protesters began doing just that, mainly because the rain had washed them into running-ink rags.

“I wonder how many of these guys are going to give back their thousand-dollar tax breaks,” one guy called out, and, apparently not getting the reception he wanted, tried the same line another ten yards down the street.

On the edges of the protest zone, an individual of indeterminate gender, sporting a pinched face and a swept-up hairdo that looked remarkably like Trump’s, edged up with a leer to anyone observing the protests. “Are you ready for your selfie?” not-Trump purred. No one seemed inclined to take not-Trump up on his/her offer.

As the rain continued to fall on the ever-more-impatient fans, the enterprising not-Trump, the scalpers, and the T-shirt sellers moved on, undeterred, each on the make, each looking for another target in the downpour. As metaphors for present-day America go, it wasn’t a bad one.

Once Trump was inside, lines shortened considerably, and fans flowed into the stadium. By the time Trump walked onto the field prior to the national anthem, nearly the entire stadium had filled up. And the reception was … well, you can hear for yourself.

Trump takes the field …. pic.twitter.com/rvN9qd0Vru — Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) January 9, 2018

The anthem, delivered by local favorites the Zac Brown Band, played with no protests, and the president joined in:

Donald Trump looked like he was struggling with the words on the National Anthem for a min there pic.twitter.com/0q03Vt4w3e — gifdsports (@gifdsports) January 9, 2018

All in all, another day in 2018 America.

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