Former NFL wide receiver Josh Gordon will return to the sport in the startup Fan Controlled Football league, as a member of the Zappers, team owner Bob Menery told ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Saturday.
Gordon will join ex-NFL quarterback Johnny Manziel in the squad for that team.
The league, which started to be played this month, offers 7-on-7 games in which fans set up squads, make plays and interact in a mix of traditional environments and electronic sports.
Gordon’s intermittent and intermittent career in the NFL faced another obstacle last month as a member of the Seattle Seahawks, when he was suspended indefinitely after the league rescinded his conditional reinstatement.
An NFL spokesman told ESPN at the time that the decision came from Gordon, 29, violating the terms of his conditional reinstatement under the league’s substance abuse policy. No other details were provided by the league.
The league suspended Gordon indefinitely in December 2019 for violations of its policies on substances of abuse and performance-enhancing substances. This was Gordon’s sixth suspension since the 2013 season and the fifth for some form of substance abuse, according to the ESPN Stats & Information survey.
Gordon was conditionally reinstated by the NFL in December and was scheduled to train with the Seahawks in the last two weeks of the regular season. Coach Pete Carroll said at the time that he had a chance to play Week 16 against the Los Angeles Rams. But in the same week, the NFL put him on the commissioner’s list of exempt ones.
Gordon signed a one-year contract with the Seahawks before the start of last season. In 63 NFL games, he has 247 receptions, 4,252 yards and 20 touchdowns. He was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the second round of the 2012 NFL supplemental draft, after playing in Utah and Baylor.
FCF teams are playing a six-week program, with games broadcast live on Twitch from a league-rented facility in Atlanta. The games last about an hour, and the course is 50 by 35 yards with 10-yard endzones.
The players have origins at the university levels FBS and FCS, along with the CFL, XFL and the Indoor Soccer League, Manziel among them.
Prior to the FCF, Manziel, 28, last played football in April 2019 for the Alliance of American Football and has also played in the Spring League and CFL since the Browns released him in 2015. Manziel and Gordon were teammates in Cleveland.