Seahawks, Steelers played by the rules with injuries
The NFL is investigating whether the Seattle Seahawks and Pittsburgh Steelers circumvented its injury report rules by not listing cornerback Richard Sherman and Le’Veon Bell on their injury reports in the weeks before their playoff games.
Sherman said he played through a sprained MCL following his team’s postseason loss at Atlanta two weeks ago, something that did not cause him to miss any time.
Bell, meanwhile, left the Steelers’ loss at New England last Sunday after six carries because of a groin injury. He admitted after the game that he had been dealing with some groin soreness for several weeks.
Conspiracy theorists have jumped on both admissions saying that teams attempted to circumvent in the league’s injury rules. In reality, however, they were playing by the injury rules as they now stand.
In August, the league announced it was doing away with the “probable” designation on its injury report because, technically, all players not listed on the injury report were probable to play in that week’s game.
So the only injury designations were “out,” “doubtful” and “questionable.”
In the eyes of Seattle head coach Pete Carroll and his Pittsburgh counterpart, Mike Tomlin, since there was no chance Sherman or Bell weren’t going to play, it made no sense to list in them as “questionable,” which typically means the player has a 50-50 chance to play.
Remember, Tomlin is a member of the NFL Competition Committee, which drew up the changes in the reporting of injuries this year. If anybody knows what this rule is about and why things were changed, it’s Tomlin.
And, as he said at his press conference earlier this week, “To my estimation, he was managing it extremely well. It didn’t cause him to miss any practice reps, so I didn’t list it. But I can go down a myriad of other people that have similar things they were working to manage.”
Bell had been given Wednesdays off in the postseason, but so was quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Tomlin regularly gives veterans or select players Wednesdays off throughout the season.
Bell also missed Thursday of last week for personal reasons – to attend the birth of a child.
And he had just rushed for 170 yards the previous week in a win at Kansas City, breaking his own team single-game record for postseason rushing.
The Steelers had no expectation that he wasn’t going to play or was going to be injured, which is what happened in the first quarter against the Patriots.
The same could be said of Sherman. He missed to game time because of the issue. So Carroll didn’t see it as a problem.
After all, if every player who was dealing with some kind of bump or bruise on a roster was listed on the injury report, it would look a lot like the old New England’s reports, which typically included 15 to 20 players in an effort to hide which players were truly injured.
The league wanted to get away from that kind of circumvention of the rules.
The injury reports date back nearly 70 years. They were implemented to keep gamblers from gaining inside information and using it for their own gain.
If the Seahawks and Steelers didn’t feel the issues with which Sherman and Bell were dealing made them questionable to play in that week’s upcoming game – and it did not – they were correct in not putting them on the report.