The Draw Play

One reason I love sports is that every year you feel guaranteed to see stupid shit you’ve never seen before. You’d think it would be difficult. The game is the same basic game. The league has the same basic problems. And yet, without fail, something stupid will happen that you’ve never seen before. I can’t say I remember ever seeing a team mismanage a dude with blood clots like this.

I write this Tuesday afternoon, and as of right now the details to this story are quite muddled, so it is hard to pin anything down. When did the doctors notice his blood clot? Who cleared him to play? How involved was the team in that decision? Was he forced to stay awake out of risk to his health and play a football game tired? Is Nick Sirianni being thrown under a bus? Would anyone be particularly sad if he was?

What we seem to know for sure was that Hurts was diagnosed with a superficial blood clot. Superficial sounds mild, and it is milder than deep vein thrombosis, but in medical terms it just means the clot is close to the surface of the skin. It is still a clot. He was cleared to play in the game. At some point the clot moved to his lungs and became serious, and now he’s going to miss the rest of the season to rehab on blood thinners.

It is hard to tell exactly what went wrong and why, but it certainly feels like something went wrong. Hurts experienced issues with the clot prior to flying to London, but the clot was not diagnosed until London. If you aren’t aware, flying with a blood clot is pretty dangerous as the lack of movement make the clot more likely to move. You don’t want the clots to move because it could enter the brain or heart or lungs and we are reaching stroke/death territory.

Yahoo has a pretty good timeline laid out if you need it. Hurts appears to have been awake in the hospital until 4am as part of the diagnosis process but he wasn’t completely without rest and he was deemed safe to play as movement is not bad for a superficial clot. I’m not a doctor and I can’t say for sure if he should have played in a brutal contact sport with a clot. It seems like the worst handling of things went down after the game when he was sent home.

Shortly after the news broke of how serious a situation Hurts was now in, Sirianni was sent alone into a press conference with seemingly no preparation to answer questions. The NFL also “investigated”, and found no wrongdoing, and even if that is true it’ll be a cold day in hell when I believe the NFL on something like this at face value. Hopefully a reporter digs deep enough and gives us the full story at some point.