The Eagles’ handling of quarterback Jalen Hurts and his blood clot in Week 5 has sparked plenty of criticism of both the team and the league, which has been in lockstep with the team.
And some of that criticism has come from the NFL’s business partners.
The NFL owns 10 percent of ESPN. That hasn’t stopped some at ESPN from offering sharp criticism of the league and the Eagles for the situation. On Wednesday’s First Take, for instance, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo went off on the situation. (Stephen A. Smith and others had sharp criticism of the situation on Tuesday’s show, too.)
“One thing if I may about this whole thing with Hurts, the Eagles did a horrendous job, OK?” Russo said. “And I’m gonna believe the NFL now? That doesn’t have grass fields, that didn’t do anything with CTE until they were forced to. That wants to play an eighteenth game for the safety of the players, when they want to play another game.
“So the NFL now is saying, ‘Well, they didn’t do anything wrong. . . . The Eagles were great with this.’ I don’t trust them. Furthermore, the Eagles throwing Sirianni out there to meet the media. That is ridiculous. I mean, he doesn’t know. I mean, he’s not the — put a trainer out there. Put a team doctor. You made the poor guy answer questions with a hungry media in Philadelphia. That was a disgrace.
“And the NFL can’t sit there and [say] they care about safety. They care about safety, why are we going for an eighteenth game? They add it to a seventeenth game. Here’s the guy that had a blood clot, that got back to the hotel at 3:00 a.m., played the football game, they came back to — flew across the country, came back and said, ‘Well, he’s gonna miss this week against Carolina.’ Then they came back and said, ‘He’s gonna miss four games.’ And then they came back and said, ‘He’s gone for the year.’ That’s ridiculous. . . . Now, come on. Literally, come on.”
The NFL also has a content partnership with The Athletic, posting items from the New York Times subsidiary at NFL.com. That didn’t stop Mike Silver of The Athletic (a former employee of the league who has talked openly about certain subjects being off limits when he worked for NFL Network and NFL.com) from going all-in with his criticism of the Eagles and the league.
“Imagine medically evaluating an employee on an off-site work assignment, subjecting him to well-documented risk factors that could exacerbate the condition — and then having his symptoms worsen to the point where they are potentially life-threatening,” Silver wrote in a column posted on Wednesday.
“Then imagine proclaiming to the world that you are in no way culpable, and that any suggestion that you could possibly have handled the situation differently is an affront to logic and decency. Throw in a touch of indignant condescension, and voila: You are the National Football League.”
Silver specifically targeted Tuesday’s effort by NFL chief medical officer Allen Sills to downplay the situation.
“Now the NFL, whose medical officials were in the loop when Hurts’ initial blood clot was discovered the night before the game, is in full cover-your-ass mode,” Silver wrote. “That’s a curious strategy, given the dots that qualified physicians might connect, made worse by the assertion that none of us — even experts in the field — are qualified to question any of it.”
The secrecy, disguised as “patient privacy concerns” (despite multiple statements that spell out Hurts’s diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis in full detail), has only added to the interest in getting answers.
On Tuesday, Sills insisted that the handling of Hurts was “very conservative, very patient-focused and appropriately guarded in every step.”
Devin McCourty, a 13-year NFL veteran, appearing on Wednesday’s PFT Live (NBC is a broadcast partner but not a business or content partner with the league), raised an excellent question. Wouldn’t a “very conservative, very patient-focused and appropriately guarded” approach to a player who spent most of the prior night in a hospital for diagnosis and evaluation of a blood clot in his leg have resulted in a decision that he should not play a full-contact pro football game hours later?
Seventeen years ago next week, the NFL was forced by Congress to take brain injuries seriously, 15 years after the formation of the decidedly unserious “Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee,” which delayed the concussion reckoning for as long as it could. The avoidance of the worst-case scenario as to Hurts has prompted the league to attempt to delay a different sort of reckoning regarding the treatment of serious health conditions not involving the brain.
Fortunately, several of the media companies that are in direct business with the league are resisting the effort to avoid answering fair and tough questions about a lingering culture that could have gotten Jalen Hurts killed.