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NFL moving next year’s draft to May

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The NFL draft is moving to May next year.

The league officially announced Tuesday the 2014 edition will be held May 8-10 at Radio City Music Hall because of a scheduling conflict in April at the venue. The NFL has yet to decide on dates for drafts in 2015 and beyond.

Commissioner Roger Goodell had said last week he expected the event to permanently move to May from late April, when Radio City is hosting an Easter show. The league is contemplating other venues for future drafts, including the possibility of holding it somewhere other than New York City.

The last time the entire draft took place in May was 1984.

The NFL says there will be no significant changes in the dates for other offseason events next year.

Oakland Raiders first-round draft pick D.J. Hayden’s comeback from a near-fatal practice injury last year was dealt a setback when he was hospitalized with an abdominal injury that is expected to keep him sidelined until at least training camp.

Coach Dennis Allen said Tuesday at the start of Oakland’s second week of OTAs that Hayden first felt symptoms last Tuesday or Wednesday. The cornerback was hospitalized late last week and had surgery to remove scar tissue from the abdominal region. The Raiders said they don’t know when Hayden will be released from the hospital.

Allen said he did not know if the latest injury was related to the torn blood vessel that nearly killed Hayden last November after a practice collision with a teammate at Houston. “We can’t rule that out, obviously, but right now I don’t know exactly what the correlation is to it,” Allen said. “But we don’t anticipate it being an issue.”

Jim Brown has come back to the team he helped lead to its last NFL championship. Brown will return in an unspecified role with the Cleveland Browns, who will formally reunite with the Hall of Fame standout at a news conference on Wednesday. Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is expected to announce Brown’s new position with the team he starred with from 1957-65 before retiring to pursue an acting career.

“We’re excited to have him back a part of us,” Browns CEO Joe Banner said. “It’s important to me because he’s clearly in the top couple, if not the single most important part of the history of the franchise, and it’s the right thing to do.”

Brown previously worked as a senior adviser with the Browns. However, his role was eliminated by former team president Mike Holmgren and Brown had been estranged from the team for a few years.

He returned to play in an alumni golf outing and was introduced on the field at halftime at a game in September, when he met with Haslam, who had just bought the team from Randy Lerner.

Ten members of Congress are urging the Washington Redskins to change their name because it is offensive to many Native Americans.

The representatives said Tuesday they’ve sent letters to Redskins owner Dan Snyder, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Redskins sponsor FedEx and the other 31 NFL franchises. The letter to Snyder says that “Native Americans throughout the country consider the ‘R-word’ a racial, derogatory slur akin to the ‘N-word’ among African Americans or the ‘W-word’ among Latinos.”

Among the group sending the letters are the leaders of the Congressional Native American Caucus: Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Betty McCollum, D-Minn.

The nickname is the subject of a long-running legal challenge from a group seeking to have the team lose its trademark protection.

Snyder has vowed that he will never change the name.

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