Pats Hid Maroney’s Broken Shoulder

After months of silence regarding the precise nature of the shoulder injury that caused him to land on injured reserve last season, Patriots running back Laurence Maroney has opted to speak out about his condition. And, in so doing, he has revealed that the team concealed it. “I had a broken bone and I was trying to play with it,” Maroney said Saturday before teammate Kevin Faulk’s charity softball game, according to Christopher Gasper of the Boston Globe. As Gasper explains, Maroney injured the shoulder in Week Two against the Jets, skipped the Week Three game against the Dolphins, and then returned to action against the 49ers, after a Week Four bye. But his name did not appear anywhere on the injury report for the Week Five game against San Francisco. The message? He was completely healthy. The reality? He was anything but. “It’s kind of hard to sit here and play and not tell people what is going on,” Maroney said. “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.” In explaining that he was frustrated by the perception that he lacks toughness, Maroney made it even more clear that there was an effort to keep the injury hidden. “Reporters have a job to report stories, whether it’s good or bad,” Maroney said. “I can’t get mad at them because they’re just doing their job. It was my job not to say nothing at the time.” After the Week Five game against San Fran, Maroney was placed on injured reserve. In fairness to the Patriots, the team listed him as “questionable” with a shoulder injury for the Week Three game that he missed. But the broader context created the perception that, by Week Five, the situation had resolved. So now the question is whether the franchise that listed Tom Brady for years as “probable” with a shoulder injury no one believed he had will face any penalty from the league office for not listing Maroney as “probable” or worse when his shoulder was flat-out fractured. If it were any other team, we’d be fairly confident that no action would be taken. But given the Patriots’ history of being caught palms flat at the bottom of the cookie jar regarding the whole videotaping of defensive coaching signals thing and in light of the stern finger-wagging the franchise received in the aftermath thereof, the league might decide that the time has come to make an example out of them, again. This time around, however, the Jets also should be nailed, given that the injury to Brett Favre’s arm/shoulder that has him now contemplating surgical options was never disclosed for the final games of the 2008 season, during which the injury supposedly was causing him to throw the ball to the guys on the other team.