Tiki’s Looking to Shake Off the Cobwebs

Get your fantasy draft boards ready. Tiki Barber is coming back.

Yes, you read that right. Tiki Barber has officially filed papers with the NFL to come out of retirement. The decision comes four years after Tiki retired from the Giants, heavily criticizing Tom Coughlin and the Giants organization in the process, and three years after the Giants won the Super Bowl without him. Now, the Giants’ all-time leading rusher can only hope that his comeback attempt fares better than his broadcasting career–Barber’s time with NBC fizzled out fast, as he quickly went from in-studio analyst to sideline correspondent to…unemployed.

So, after criticizing Coughlin and QB Eli Manning so much following his tenure with the Giants, it’s only logical to say that Tiki will certainly not be back in the Meadowlands. But what options does that leave him? I’d say the leading candidate at this point is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where CB Ronde Barber (Tiki’s brother) is a mainstay, and the RB corps is in need of a veteran presence–Earnest Graham is more of a fullback, and LaGarrette Blount could benefit from learning under an experienced rusher. The other possible destination? Miami. It’s pretty much a given that the Dolphins are hoping RB Mark Ingram will fall to them at No. 15 in this year’s NFL Draft, but no one is quite sure what will happen to Ronnie Brown or Ricky Williams. Tiki could act as a stopgap for the Dolphins if they choose to draft Ingram and let Brown and “Sticky Icky” Ricky Williams go.

We can only look forward to ESPN’s presentation of “The Decision: Tiki Barber Edition” later this year.

–Hollywood

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