In November, Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill told ESPN’s Lisa Salters that he had suffered a wrist injury during training camp. However, Hill didn’t appear on the injury report with a wrist injury until Week 10.
At the time, we asked the NFL whether there would be a review of the situation, or whether the league had any comment.
“The league routinely communicates with a club when questions arise concerning the injury report,” chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said via email on November 12.
On Thursday, agent Drew Rosenhaus appeared on Pat McAfee’s show. Rosenhaus prefaced his comments about the current state of the relationship between Hill and the team with an important admission.
“So let’s back up to training camp,” Rosenhaus said. “Tyreek’s scrimmaging with the Washington Commanders, and he breaks his wrist. We have top wrist doctors saying to Tyreek, ‘You need to get this operated on, you’re gonna miss the season.’ Tyreek says to me and the Dolphins, ‘I’m not gonna miss the season. I wanna play. I wanna be here for my team.’ . . . This hampered him all year long.”
In some cases, teams don’t disclose a player’s injury because the team doesn’t know. If the player gets treatment away from the facility, there’s no record of it.
But if what Rosenhaus said is true and correct, the Dolphins knew. And they didn’t disclose it. For nine weeks.
Here’s where it gets very interesting. And maybe very expensive. With the league and its teams grabbing every last gambling sponsorship dollar that it can, Rosenhaus’s comments kick the door open for a nationwide class action against the NFL and the team seeking full reimbursement for all relevant wagers (including Hill’s prop bets that failed to hit the over) due to the concealment of the injury.
It’s not far-fetched; i’s inevitable. Just this week, a class action was filed against DraftKings alleging that it has lured consumers “with deliberately misleading promotions and false promises of ‘risk-free’ first bets, leading many gamblers to develop addictions.”
If that sounds somewhat nebulous, this does not: The Dolphins, which receive millions in sports book advertising, deliberately concealed from consumers for nine weeks the fact that Tyreek Hill had a broken wrist, and the NFL negligently failed to develop and/or to enforce policies and procedures aimed at ensuring full compliance.
All it takes is one bettor who bet the over on any of Hill’s props through Week 9, and away we go.
The league is smart enough to know that it shouldn’t fuel such potential, and inevitable, litigation by telling the world about its communications with teams that might have violated the injury policy. Thanks to Rosenhaus’s candor, it doesn’t matter.
Don’t look for anything to change until cases like that are filed. Once it happens, the injury policy undoubtedly will be overhauled — presumably after the league targets one team (like the Saints in 2012 for the widespread culture of bounties) and issues suspensions and other penalties, including the stripping of draft picks.