In the first half of Sunday’s home loss to the Cardinals, Bears quarterback Jay Cutler did a face plant while trying to make a tackle after throwing an interception. He appeared to hurt his shoulder or some other area of his upper body.
Officially, the team called it a hamstring injury.
If, as some believe, they fibbed about the actual injury, why would they do it? For the answer, let’s rewind the clock to 2003, when former Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer suffered a separated shoulder during a game and former Broncos coach Mike Shanahan said Plummer had a concussion.
Shanahan was fined for the fabrication, which he defended for strategic reasons. In the event that Denver’s other quarterback at the time had been injured and Plummer had been forced to re-enter the game (yes, in 2003 a guy could re-enter a game with a concussion), Shanahan didn’t want the opposition to know Plummer actually had a bad shoulder.
“To share with somebody that Jake has a separated shoulder and could not throw and our quarterback goes down, we have a good chance to lose the football game,” Shanahan said at the time.
As to Cutler, it’s possible that similar reasoning applied. If Jimmy Clausen were injured and Cutler had to re-enter the game, the Bears would have preferred to have the Cardinals think he has a leg injury instead of an arm injury.
Or, looking ahead to future games, it’s possible that the Bears didn’t want to apply a bull’s-eye to Cutler’s shoulder.
