Given both the massive contract the Falcons will give to quarterback Kirk Cousins and the fact that he’s recovering from a torn Achilles tendon suffered little more than four months ago, it became critical for the Falcons to develop sufficient comfort with Cousins’s health before agreeing to terms with him.
If they did so without tampering, they did it within roughly two hours.
Per the NFL, a team with interest in a pending free agent can’t start gathering medical information until the start of the two-day negotiating period. Also, the new team is prohibited from gathering any medical information from the current team until the formal expiration of the contract at the start of the new league year.
“Club-to-club discussions between medical staffs and athletic trainers cannot occur until the expiration of such contract,” chief NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said via email. “However, clubs may request that the certified agent of any prospective UFA or the Unrepresented Player provide medical records or access to medical information during the negotiating period.”
So the Falcons were permitted to do nothing to gather information about Cousins’s injury, surgery, recovery, and/or rehab until noon ET on Monday. Even then, they could get it only from Cousins’s agent.
How much information could they gather, digest, evaluate, and contemplate in roughly two hours? Did they have information before the negotiating period began?
As previously mentioned, the NFL routinely looks the other way on the rampant tampering that happens between teams. The NFL acts sporadically, and often unpredictably.
This is a new situation. The player is barely four months removed from a torn Achilles tendon. The contract is massive. No medical information could be requested or obtained until noon ET on Monday. Before 3:00 p.m. ET, the deal was done.
It’s one thing for agents and teams to have verbal conversations, in person or by phone, before the negotiating period begins. It’s quite another for digital footprints to be generated of medical records being sent and received.
The league most likely won’t do anything about it. One of these years, the league will. In a case like this, it might not be very hard to launch a witch hunt that successfully locates a witch.
