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NFL executives defended the Eagles medical staff’s handling of Jalen Hurts and criticized “considerable and uninformed speculation” on the care that the quarterback received for blood clotting before and after playing in a game in London.
“Our first obligation as team physicians is always to the patient,” chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said Tuesday at the NFL owners meetings in Midtown. “Any idea that a team physician is ever being influenced by a coach, a general manager or an owner, it just doesn’t happen. The notion that there’s external factors that any of our physicians would put a player in harm’s way, that’s nonsense.”
Hurts originally was revealed to have played through a superficial blood clot. The diagnosis was modified this week to deep vein thrombosis in his left leg and bilateral pulmonary emboli (blood clots in both lungs), which started as calf pain after taking a cleat to his left calf during an Oct. 4 game. He played the next week in London.
Hurts is expected to miss at least the rest of the regular season.
“I think there was incredible vigilance, conservative care, state-of-the-art imaging that was done in London,” Sills said. “I have great confidence that everyone acted with an abundance of caution and with a tremendous high degree of suspicion. And, most importantly, acted at every moment with the patient’s best interest at heart.”
Sills, who arranged for Hurts’ care at the Cleveland Clinic in London as he does for all NFL games played in international markets, declined to discuss specifics of the Hurts case, citing patient confidentiality.
But Sills said that clotting disorders have been tracked in players for at least the past 10 years and it is “not a novel situation.” He estimated an average season involves fewer than 10 cases of DVT.
Whether a player can play through a condition is based on other case-by-case physiological variables.
Hurts was cleared for a transatlantic flight, even though general medical research suggests it is unsafe to fly with DVT. It wasn’t just one doctor’s opinion but a panel of experts.
“The issue of the safety of flying players to and from games is something the clubs spend a lot of time on,” Sills said. “For our international games, part of that assessment is, ‘Is there somebody with a condition that ought to stay here?’ We have all those preparations in place. It’s not just jump on the plane and we’ll sort this out when we get back home.”
Hurts was reported to not have slept for 36 hours before kickoff.
NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller said that information gathered by the league from the team and others on the ground indicates that Hurts slept for at least seven hours after returning from the clinic.
Jets owners Woody Johnson and Christopher Johnson, and Giants owner John Mara and chairman Steve Tisch (who transferred his ownership stake) were all in attendance at the meeting but did not stop to be interviewed.