One of the NFL’s official slogan goes like this: “Football is family.”
And, at times, the NFL has to protect the family.
That’s the best way to explain the league’s statement, dumped into the late Friday afternoon news cycle, regarding the 49ers’ mishandling of running back Christian McCaffrey’s injury status for Week 1.
To summarize, the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable on Saturday with a calf and Achilles injury. He was never downgraded. On Monday, ninety minutes before kickoff, his name appeared on the list of inactive players.
After running back Jordan Mason let the cat out of the bag following his 28-carry performance in place of McCaffrey, PFT asked the league about the situation. The comment was, “No comment.”
Here’s today’s comment from the league: “We looked into the 49ers’ reporting of the playing status of Christian McCaffrey for the team’s Monday night game against the New York Jets. We have found no evidence of a violation of the league’s Injury Report Policy in this matter.”
If they found no evidence, they weren’t looking very hard. Which is no surprise. The league has no interest in exposing this type of misconduct by teams, not in a world of widespread legalized gambling. If the NFL had whacked the 49ers, the murmurs from those who were screwed (via prop bets and/or fantasy football) by the 49ers’ concealment of McCaffrey’s status would have become a full-blown uproar.
No, the league has no interest in exposing anything that undermines the integrity of the broad range of wagers that are made on its product. That’s the quickest way to have Congress inserting probes into places where those being probed don’t want probes to probe.
At some point between Saturday and Monday, the 49ers knew McCaffrey’s expected availability was less than 50-50. He didn’t spontaneously slip from the 51-99 percent range (which is the meaning of “questionable”) to zero percent in the moment the 49ers were compiling their list of inactive players. (As Mason tells it, the 49ers knew about it before Saturday.) He should have been downgraded, to doubtful or out, at some point before the inactive players were identified.
By whacking the 49ers for this, the NFL would have invited a whacking of its own. The league’s sports book partners might have had to refund bets, which might have prompted them to ask the league to foot the bill. And how could anyone even begin to unring the bell regarding the mess that the 49ers’ apparent ruse created for fantasy football?
No, the NFL gains nothing by finding that the 49ers did anything wrong. Even though the circumstantial evidence and basic common sense strongly suggests they did.
Keep that in mind whenever the league investigates one of its teams. The end result is precisely as reliable as the annual audit of Henhouse Industries conducted by the accounting firm of Fox & Coyote, PLLC.
