The Leading Authority of the NFL Draft

According to Boston.com, New England's Laurence Maroney revealed that the shoulder injury that limited him to three games last season was in fact a broken bone. The Patriots placed him on injured reserve Oct. 20. "I had a broken bone and I was trying to play with it," said Maroney. "It's kind of hard to sit here and play and not tell people what is going on. Everybody is going to think one way because they don't really know what's going on. I dare anybody in this crowd to play football with a broken bone in your shoulder and you tell me how long you're going to last out there."

Mandel's Take: The disappointing back injured himself against the Jets in the second game of the season. He then missed a game and when he tried to return against San Francisco, he was timid. After the game, Maroney said he had "issues" but his reptuation took a massive hit--the word "soft" was bandied about. Apparently Maroney had had enough and needed the truth to come out more than he needed to maintain Colonel Jessup's, er, Coach Belichick's code of injury silence. The interesting thing here will be the NFL's handling of this--the Pats have had a long history of annoying everyone with their coyness on injury reports...will the league take action in this case? Rev, if they don't, doesn't it make the whole injury report a joke? Roger Goodell doesn't like jokes, especially those made at his expense.

Mancini's Take: Yeah, agreed, but how do you go about policing gamesmanship? In this case, Maroney came out in the open due to people questioning his toughness and accusing him of bouncing runs outside instead of looking for contact. But Maroney's admission is the exception rather than the rule. Most players won't go against the team's wishes and publicly announce their injuries. I don't have a problem with the Pats being punished for their alleged refusal to dispense player information, but a fine won't stop other teams from pulling off the same thing. Depriving a team of draft picks, on the other hand, may make certain organizations wary of following Bellichick's lead.

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment