The Bengals are in full-blown “nothing to see here” mode. And for a good reason. When they get arrested for covering up an injury to their starting quarterback. It could be expensive.
Very expensive.
It is currently known that quarterback Joe Burrow is out for the season with a throwing wrist injury. It is unknown whether the injury was related to why he was wearing a bandage on the same wrist a day earlier. Further deepening this mystery, the Bengals posted a video of Burrow wearing a wrist brace on social media and then deleted it.
Burrow told reporters Friday that the wrist injury was a “completely different thing” than the reason he wore the sling on Wednesday. He didn’t say what it was specifically. (Also watch the video. Check out the non-verbal narration as he says “completely different…something different.”)
“It’s not uncommon for men to wear compression sleeves on planes,” Burrow added. “If you go up in height, it can swell.”
During football season I go up twice a week. And random body parts don’t spontaneously swell for me.
Things don’t get better without trauma. Inevitably, Burrow had something on his wrist/hand/arm that was prone to swelling, presumably due to an injury.
In fact, he admitted that he had “bumps and bruises.”
Could it be that he had a wrist condition that worsened when he hit the ground Thursday night? Was he vulnerable to the injury that ended his season because of the “totally different thing”?
Here’s the point. Whatever was troubling him about the swelling in that area is a condition that probably should have been listed on the injury report.
Again, why did the Bengals delete the video? If it wasn’t a big deal, why not move on? If there was nothing to see here, why did someone basically say, “Oh shit, we can’t let them see that”?
The NFL is investigating. But the NFL has no reason to conclude that the Bengals concealed a pre-existing injury. The end result of the investigation will be the same four-word refrain that we have all become accustomed to.
There’s nothing to see here.