Given the ongoing developments in the Jalen Hurts situation, reporters covering the team understandably have questions. Given that only Eagles coach Nick Sirianni was available to talk to reporters on Monday, he understandably was the person to be asked those questions.
As his comments during Monday's press conference demonstrated, Sirianni wasn't fully committed to providing the kind of transparency and details that the reporters were hoping for.
But Sirianni made one comment, in passing, that highlights the deeper problem that still lingers within NFL organizations, years after the league was forced by Congress to take head trauma seriously by involving unaffiliated physicians to decide when a player should be allowed to play after suffering a concussion. Too many teams, and the doctors they employ, view the job not as treating the players as patients but as the vehicle for checking the boxes needed to allow a player to play.
Here's what Sirianni said, when asked to identify the persons who were part of the conversations surrounding the medical decisions made after a blood clot was discovered in Hurts's leg: "I think I'll put it this way, the same doctors and trainers that helped 21 of our 22 starters be available in the Super Bowl are the same guys today that deeply care about our guys to help them." (Emphasis added.)
The doctors shouldn't be there to help players "be available." They should be there to provide medical care to players who, when they have a health issue, become patients. Without an unaffiliated doctor involved in the process, the objective easily can shift from taking the best care of the patient to best enhancing the ability of the player to play.
That's why the Hurts case should be the starting point for a comprehensive examination of the entire system of providing medical care to NFL players. With the player wanting to be able to play and the team wanting the player to be able to play, a doctor who is perceived as saying too often "this player shouldn't be available to play" risks being replaced by a doctor who understands the unspoken (usually) goal of ensuring that as many players as possible will "be available" to play in every game.
As the Eagles continue to stumble their way through the aftermath of an incident that features a growing list of head-scratching decisions, the only way to make sense of it is to view the entire exercise as an effort not to provide Jalen Hurts with the best possible medical care but to allow the player and the team to achieve the shared objective of ensuring that he would "be available" to play.
With Hurts, the immediate reaction to the discovery of the blood clot seemed to be about doing whatever needed to be done to allow him to play. Even if it meant advising him not to sleep as a precaution.
That one inexplicable wrinkle has led to even more confusion, with Tom Pelissero of Netflix tweaking his report that Hurts was told not to sleep and didn’t to Hurts actually sleeping, at least a little bit, at the stadium before the game.
All evidence that has been made available to the public creates the impression not that the Hurts blood clot was viewed as a medical emergency for the patient but as an availability emergency for the player and the team.
"What do we need to do to make sure he'll be available?" shouldn't be the question. It should be, "What do we need to do to take care of this player?," with his availability being a secondary concern, at most.
Consider the still-unanswered question of why Hurts was allowed to fly across the Atlantic Ocean despite having a diagnosed blood clot in his leg, less than three days after flying across the Atlantic Ocean with an undiagnosed blood clot in his leg. It seems that the concern wasn't ensuring that Jalen Hurts would be at no enhanced risk of further issues, but of keeping the door open to Jalen Hurts being able to play on Sunday against the Panthers, and beyond.
It's an important issue that shouldn't be glossed over simply because Hurts avoided the worst possible outcome of a pulmonary embolism. The league and its teams should view the matter as a wakeup call regarding the still-lingering culture of using doctors not as resources for patient care but as tools for player availability.