The NFL reportedly has no issue with the manner in which the Eagles handled the health of quarterback Jalen Hurts in London. In contrast, the league is not thrilled with the manner in which the team handled the ensuing controversy.
Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing an unnamed “longtime source well-connected to the NFL offices,” reports that the powers-that-be are “furious” with the team for its messaging regarding the situation.
To date, only coach Nick Sirianni has been made available to answer the obvious follow-up questions raised by a pair of statements issued by the team. Sirianni didn’t have much to say, regardless of whether he did (or didn’t) know more about the matter than he shared.
G.M. Howie Roseman, who runs the entire football operation, has not addressed the issue. The doctors who evaluated Hurts have not been made available.
Through it all, the team has hidden behind “patient privacy” — even after the statements shared specific details about the “superficial” blood clot that became a deep vein thrombosis and multiple blood clots in his lungs. The medical privacy rights of Jalen Hurts have already been compromised, if not expressly waived. Specific questions about how the initial condition arose, when it was diagnosed, how it was treated, and whether the complications flowed from those decisions are irrelevant at this point to the issue of privacy.
Of course, the NFL didn’t help the situation via the dismissive comments made by multiple executives last week, including chief medical officer Allen Sills. His insistence that Hurts had “very conservative” care doesn’t mesh on the surface with the decision to let him fly to London, to play in London, and to fly home from London.
On Sunday, the NFL and NFL Players Association jointly announced that they are “working together” on the Hurts case. It’s unclear what that means, especially since the NFLPA has not yet officially invoked its unilateral right to demand an investigation under Article 39, Section 5(f) of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The union can’t afford the perception of complicity in a possible coverup. Any investigation, in whatever form it takes, must seek real answers to hard questions and provide them to the public.
It’s impossible for the NFL to, on one hand, welcome public attention, engagement, and stadium funding while, on the other, say “none of your damn business” when the public has natural curiosity about the things that happen to NFL players. Last week, the Eagles failed to satisfy the widespread interest in Hurts’s case. Moving forward, any effort to investigate what happened must include a commitment to true and complete transparency.
Through it all, the Eagles play a home game tonight against the Cowboys. It will be interesting to see whether and to what extent ESPN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the game advances the lingering Hurts story.