New policy a doubtful solution
“doubtful,” three nebulous signposts along the murky continuum between playing and not playing. But the league’s Competition Committee (which includes Steelers coach Mike Tomlin among 11 league executives and coaches) now has decided that no player shall henceforth be listed as “probable,” in part because 95 percent of the people on that list wind up playing in the game, and in part because coaches routinely list healthy players as probable to create doubt in the minds of their opponents, who might spend valuable practice time preparing to face someone else, because clearly they themselves would never engage in such blatant disengenuousness. (Snort II!) You could say then, that the NFL formally has found at least “questionable,” the “doubtful” utility of “probable.” Could, I said; you’re probably not so tedious.
From now on, all injured players shall be listed either as “questionable” or “doubtful,” save those who are listed as “out.” Now “out,” it turns out, still means “out,” but “questionable,” which used to mean having a 50 percent likelihood to play (aka he might play and he might not), now means “uncertain to play,” while “doubtful” now means “unlikely to play.” I know. What? Lurching for the fattest real dictionary I could find (Webster’s Third New International, unabridged; estimated shipping weight 77 pounds), I tried to measure the rhetorical distance between “uncertain” and “unlikely,” without much success. “Uncertain” can mean problematical, just as “unlikely” can be “not such to inspire liking” as well as “objectionable, unattractive, likely to fail.”
See? Too judgmental. Plus it clears up nothing. The league would have done just as well to call questionable “irresolute,” and doubtful “dissimulated.” Not that anyone will be taking my advice. I once planned to offer the league, free of charge, a nine-tiered game-day injury report that would have put a far finer point on the status of individual injured players, but ultimately thought better of it. Perhaps you’ll see why. These were my nine tiers: Probable. Dubious. Vulnerable. Questionable. Non-plussed. Ambiguous. Doubtful. Objectionable. Out. I know. What? You should further be aware that “out,” is now out as a component of the Practice Report, the in-week precursor of the Game Report, which becomes official 48 hours before kickoff. The Practice Report will no longer list players as “out,” only as DNP (Did Not Participate in practice) FP (Full Participation), or LP (Limited Participation). Because limited participation means, technically, participating in less than 100 percent of a player’s normal reps, the enlightened coach could reduce a key player’s practice reps by just one on a Wednesday, for example, and still be allowed to list him as LP, but that’s counter to the spirit of the new rule, which endeavors to limit “rising gamesmanship.” Oh my. And that brings us back inevitably to Brady and head coach Bill “Rising Gamesmanship” Belichick, who, after Brady suffered a shoulder injury in 2002, listed him as probable on the game reports for most of the next six years, the one exception being the the 2005 opener.
In one of NFL history’s greater ironies then, when New England opens its season Sept. 11 at Arizona, Brady cannot be listed as “probable,” not because of the new policy, but must be listed as “out” because the NFL found it “more probable than not,” that he helped deflate footballs.
As Brady will miss four games with the resultant suspension, here then are his predicted official game-day designations through Week 5: “Out,” “out,” “out,” “out,” “questionable.”