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At the NFL owners meetings, head coach John Harbaugh said that he hadn't talked to McClain about his potential return.
A month ago, Rolando McClain went to Twitter to express interest in making a comeback to football.
Judging by the love from twitter, I need to comeback and be a #Raven
— Rolando McClain (@RMcClain205) March 11, 2014
After signing a 1 year deal with the Ravens last offseason, Rolando ran into some more trouble with the law and abruptly retired in an effort to get his personal life together. Due to the retirement, the Ravens still hold the rights of the 24 year old inside linebacker.
Harbaugh had this to say:
To me, it all depends on a couple things. Who [is he] as a person right now? Has he grown up? He had a lot of growing up to do obviously. And how hard he's working, how hard he's working at Alabama right now. If he's working his rear end off, then I'm kind of excited about him. If he's not, then I've got no interest in him being on our team.
While the Ravens don't have a pressing need for an inside linebacker, a motivated first round pick might be able to push one of the backups, Josh Bynes and Albert McClellan, off the team or solely into a special teams role while competing for some starting time with Arthur Brown. However, the inability to contact Harbaugh should show as a sign that the comeback talk might have been little more than social media posturing by McClain.
Harbaugh didn't mention if there was a specific timeframe that he or the Ravens would need to know about McClain's true intentions.
If he unretires or whatever the situation is, then we'll decide whether he is going to be good for our team, and if we think yes, then we have the rights to him and he'll have to come back with us. But if we don't think he'll be good for our team, we'll let him go and play for somebody else. It's all up to Rolando McClain. Who are you? How hard are you working? And how much do you want to play football? Up to this point, he hasn't really wanted to play football. That's what I'm interested in as a coach.
While it would be nice to have the former 1st round pick on the team if he was properly in shape and motivated, it looks more and more like McClain's talk is as far as it will go.