Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts clearly had an issue with his knee on Sunday night against the Dolphins. The Eagles clearly are concealing it from the official injury report. This week — both on Wednesday and now on Thursday — Hurts is not listed on the practice report.
Given the circumstances, which included Hurts adding a knee brace during Sunday night’s win over Miami, it would seem to be obvious for the Eagles to list Hurts as fully participating in practice with a knee injury both days this week. They have not.
Presumably, he has gotten no treatment at the team facility for any injury. Treatment is the key ingredient toward disclosure of an injury; if an injury isn’t listed and the league asks for treatment records and sees the player’s name, the team gets busted. (That’s what happened to the Jets in 2009, after it became obvious they had hidden Brett Favre’s biceps tendon injury the prior season — after Favre repeatedly cited the undisclosed injury as the reason for his decline in performance down the stretch following his arrival in Minnesota.)
As Chris Simms pointed out on Thursday’s PFT Live, some of today’s players often get treatment on their own. The team would then have no record of the player getting treatment at the team facility. (In 2020, for example, Bucs quarterback Tom Brady played the entire season with a fully-torn MCL that was never disclosed. Quite possibly, he got any and all treatment from Alex Guerrero, off site.)
The difference here is that we know about it, because Hurts and coach Nick Sirianni have talked about it. Wouldn’t it make sense to just put him on the report, if we already know he has a knee injury?
It’s a risky proposition for the Eagles to not disclose the injury. The NFL, which already is looking into the Falcons’ failure to disclose running back Bijan Robinson’s illness on Sunday, could eventually pivot to the Hurts injury. If, as Hurts said, it didn’t happen during the game, common sense suggests it happened before the game. If it had been disclosed, that information would have been relevant to people inclined to use Hurts as a fantasy option in cash-based games and/or to place wagers involving Hurts’s specific statistics in the Week 7 game — most notably rushing yards (he had 21 for the game).
