We’re now in Week 14 of the NFL season, and in my injury world, there’s usually a noticeable shift around this time. Injuries that would’ve once been carefully rehabbed will now immediately send players to the injured reserve list, especially on teams that might not be playoff-bound. This makes sense, as there are better uses for valuable roster space than keeping a player on to rehab something like a high ankle sprain where the most optimistic outcome would be to have the player back for the final, meaningless game or two.
But beyond the medical side of things, this stretch of the season is often marked with a willingness by teams to throw in the towel and pull the plug on players that the team views as a problem. Such seems to be the case with the Bears and TE Martellus Bennett. There’s no doubt that Bennett is injured. He missed Week 12 with an unspecified rib injury. He attempted to play through the injury in Week 13, but appeared to suffer a re-aggravation of the same injury, though he was able to stay in the game. Two days later, the Bears announced that Bennett was being moved to injured reserve and would miss the last four games of the season.
To be fair, there are rib injuries that would justify this move. But those injuries would be severe enough that Bennett would likely not have played through them. If Bennett had multiple fractured ribs, the IR move might be warranted, though plenty of players only miss about two games with multiple fractured ribs, and again, we have no reason to think Bennett’s injury was that severe. Head coach John Fox had spoken about Bennett as, “day-to-day,” with the rib injury, whatever it was.
There’s a wrinkle that might help explain the move though. Dan Wiederer of the Chicago Tribune reported that Bennett had been brooding and seemed to be butting heads with John Fox. Yup, that’ll do it. I love Martellus Bennett, but the dude is a bit of an oddball, and he seemed to be a much better fit under the previous coach, Marc Trestman. Although Bennett is still under contract, it sounds like the Bears are ready to be done with him, and moving him to injured reserve with a minor rib issue would certainly be one way to accomplish that. Like a decent chunk of the cases that I write about, this move seems to be far more roster-based than injury-based, even though it uses the injured reserve designation. The good news here, at least for Bennett, is that there aren’t really any rib injuries that would spill over into the following season, so there’s no reason to think he won’t be 100% healthy in even a short few weeks.
