The Eagles’ handling of quarterback Jalen Hurts and his blood clot in Week 5 has drawn widespread criticism of both the team and the league, which has been in lockstep with the team.
And some of that criticism comes from the NFL’s business partners.
The NFL owns 10 percent of ESPN. That hasn’t stopped some members of ESPN from heavily criticizing the league and the Eagles for the situation. Wednesday First takefor example, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo spoke out about the situation. (Stephen A. Smith and others also sharply criticized the situation on Tuesday’s show.)
“One thing, if I may, about this whole Hurts thing, the The Eagles did a terrible jobOK?’” Russo said. “And I’m going to believe the NFL now? There are no turf fields, they didn’t do anything with CTE until they were forced to. That’s playing an eighteenth game for the safety of the players, when they want to play another game.
“So the NFL now says, ‘Well, they didn’t do anything wrong…The Eagles were great with it.’ I don’t trust them. Additionally, the Eagles are launching Sirianni to meet with the media. It’s ridiculous. I mean, he doesn’t know. I mean, he’s not the… put a coach there. Put a team doctor. You made the poor guy answer questions from a hungry media in Philadelphia. It was a shame.
“And the NFL can’t stand there and (say) they care about safety. They care about safety, why are we going to play an eighteenth game? They add it to a seventeenth game. Here’s the guy who had a blood clot, went back to the hotel at 3 a.m., played the football game, they came back – flew across the country, came back and said, ‘Well, he’s going to miss this week against the Caroline.” Then they came back and said, “He’s going to miss four games.” And then they came back and said, “He’s gone for a year.” It’s ridiculous. . . . Now, come on. Literally, come on.
The NFL also has a content partnership with Athleticsby publishing elements of New York Times affiliate of NFL.com. That didn’t stop Mike Silver from The Athletic (a former league employee who spoken openly on certain topics being prohibited when he worked for NFL Network and NFL.com) of going all-in with his criticism of the Eagles and the league.
“Imagine medically evaluating an employee on an off-site assignment, subjecting them to well-documented risk factors that could worsen their illness, and then seeing their symptoms worsen to the point of potentially being life-threatening,” Silver wrote in a column published Wednesday.
“So imagine proclaiming to the world that you are in no way guilty and that any suggestion that you could have handled the situation differently is an affront to logic and decency. Add a touch of indignant condescension, and voila: You are the National Football League.
Silver specifically targeted efforts by NFL chief medical officer Allen Sills on Tuesday to downplay the situation.
“Now the NFL, whose medical officials knew about it when Hurts’ first blood clot was discovered the night before the game, is in full cover-up mode,” Silver wrote. “It’s a curious strategy, given the dots that qualified doctors could connect, compounded by the assertion that none of us – even experts in the field – are qualified to question anything.”
The secrecy, disguised as “patient privacy concerns” (despite multiple statements detailing Hurts’ diagnosis, treatment and prognosis), only added to the interest in getting answers.
On Tuesday, Sills insisted that Hurts’ management was “very conservative, very patient focused and properly protected at every stage.”
Devin McCourty, a 13-year NFL veteran, will appear Wednesday Live PFT (NBC is a broadcast partner but not a commercial or content partner of the league), raised an excellent question. Wouldn’t a “very conservative, very patient-centered, properly monitored” approach to a player who spent most of the previous 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 professional contact football game just hours later?
Seventeen years ago next week, Congress forced the NFL to take brain injuries seriously, 15 years after the formation of the decidedly unserious “Mild Head Injury Committee” which delayed the assessment of concussions as long as possible. Avoiding a worst-case scenario regarding injuries has prompted the league to attempt to delay a different kind of reckoning regarding the treatment of serious health conditions not involving the brain.
Fortunately, several media companies that have a direct relationship with the league are resisting efforts to avoid answering fair and difficult questions about a persistent culture that could have led to the death of Jalen Hurts.
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