The 49ers’ handling of the surprise decision to make running back Christian McCaffrey (calf, Achilles) inactive for Monday night’s game against the Jets creates plenty of questions, especially since running back Jordan Mason said he learned he’d be starting on Friday, one day before the 49ers listed McCaffrey as questionable.
We asked the league about the situation.
“We will decline to comment,” a league spokesperson told PFT via email.
It’s unclear whether that means everything is fine. If so, why not say so?
Whatever the league does (or doesn’t do), the situation exposes a very real problem with the injury-reporting rules. It’s easy to comply. It’s even easier to manipulate. When in doubt, make the player questionable and say nothing more until he’s inactive.
Although it’s unrealistic to require teams to declare their inactive players before warmups, the league could devise something that would send a stronger message about a player’s potential unavailability.
Maybe the league doesn’t need to do that. Maybe the 49ers broke the rules by not downgrading McCaffrey to doubtful. Even if his status as of Friday truly was questionable and not doubtful, it surely became doubtful at some point before he was scratched. The moment the 49ers recognized McCaffrey was on the wrong side of 50-50 is the downgrade should have happened.
It’s not our job to come up with potential revisions to a broken set of rules, especially in an age of legalized gambling and widespread NFL profit from it. At a minimum, the league needs to eliminate the ability of teams to tuck a starting player into the “questionable” category and to deactivate him without warning only 90 minutes before kickoff.
For a broad range of wagers and fantasy football games, 90 minutes before kickoff is way too late — especially for the last game of the weekend.