Soward Is Suspended for 2002 Season

Jacksonville Jaguar receiver R. Jay Soward was suspended Wednesday by the NFL for the 2002 season following his third violation of the league’s substance-abuse policy.

Soward, Jacksonville’s top draft pick in 2000 from USC, didn’t play this season because of three previous suspensions, including one by the club.

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Dennis Green won’t be coaching in the NFL next season. He’ll be gone fishin’.

Less than a week after he was forced out as coach and general manager of the Minnesota Vikings, Green said he will appear on “FLW Outdoors,” a fishing show to be carried on the Pax Network.

Green’s program will be broadcast live Saturday afternoons from a studio at Little Rock, Ark.

Green, 52, said the new venture “absolutely” ruled out a chance of him coaching in 2002, but said he “probably” would continue his coaching career in the future. He alluded to doing studio analysis on NFL games next fall, but declined to identify the network.

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Forty-four former Philadelphia Eagle cheerleaders joined a lawsuit charging that visiting players spied on them as they showered and dressed in a Veterans Stadium locker room.

In the lawsuit filed in state court in Philadelphia, the women seek damages from members of the 29 NFL teams that played at the stadium since 1983.

The players allegedly spied on the women through holes in a door that separates the visitors’ locker room from the cheerleaders’ shower room, and through cracks in various walls and scratches in a painted window.

Eagle spokesman Ron Howard said the team had no immediate comment.

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Baltimore Raven linebacker Brad Jackson successfully defended himself in Baltimore County Circuit Court against civil assault charges filed by Gretchen Kocher while the two were exchanging their children outside her Owings Mills apartment on New Year’s Eve.

Police responded, but no criminal charges were filed.

Jackson and Kocher are involved in a bitter legal dispute over custody of the children, ages 5 and 3, according to court papers.

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New Orleans re-signed defensive tackle Martin Chase to a two-year contract.... Denver receiver Ed McCaffrey, who sat out most of the 2001 season because of a broken leg, had surgery Tuesday to remove two screws used to stabilize a rod inserted in his leg.