After Thursday night’s win over the Bears, Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo blurted out that he has been dealing with a previously undisclosed rib injury.
Because the rib injury was undisclosed, the injury didn’t appear in the injury reports. As a result, the NFL is exploring whether the Cowboys violated the rules regarding the reporting of injuries.
“We’re looking into it,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said via email.
Of course, the NFL looked into it after the Cowboys failed to disclose Romo’s pre-existing back injury before the back gave out on him last year in Week 16. And the NFL did nothing about it.
Typically, the NFL doesn’t like to nail its teams for violating the injury reporting rules, for multiple reasons. First, the NFL prefers not to publicly admit that there are cheaters in its midst. Second, the rules regarding the reporting of injuries are far from perfect, allowing for all sorts of irregularities and blatant violations. Third, if the public becomes aware of enough violations, the public will begin to realize that, while the rules are aimed at erasing the perception of the existence of inside information that would be available to gamblers, inside information indeed exists. And every Henry Hill or Jimmy Burke or Johnny Bag-a-donuts already knows it.
And they probably already know how to go about getting it.