Civil lawsuits would be easy to file against Bengals, NFL over Joe Burrow injury
There are many reasons to believe the NFL will not find that the Bengals concealed a pre-existing wrist injury to quarterback Joe Burrow.
Beyond the P.R. ramifications of admitting to the world that one of the league's 32 franchises was playing fast and loose with the injury-reporting rules, it would be very easy for anyone who relied on Burrow's absence from the report in placing a wager on the Bengals to use the outcome of the league's investigation as the fuel for a fraud lawsuit.
Yes, fraud. You might have heard a thing or two about it in the news recently. It's basically lying. Lying with a purpose.
For the Bengals, the purpose would have been to conceal Burrow's injury from the Ravens, or from anyone else. The impact on gamblers would be to keep them from realizing that Burrow might not have played at a high level, or might not have finished the game.
The argument, within the context of a civil lawsuit, would be that those who bet on the Bengals to win on a money line wager or to cover the 3.5-point spread relied on the absence of Burrow from the injury report in believing the Bengals would win and/or cover. More specifically, that they would not have bet on the Bengals to win and/or to cover if they had known the truth.
It's possible that a class action could be pursued, with everyone in a given state (or nationally) who placed a bet on the Bengals looking to get a refund from the Bengals for hiding the injury.
The NFL could be included in the litigation as well, based on the potential argument that the league negligently failed to enforce its own rules regarding the injury reports, emboldening teams like the Bengals to keep Burrow's injury hidden.
While the NFL and its teams should be worried about the possibility that Congress (if it ever gets its act together) could explore the integrity of sports wagering and/or that a prosecutor could examine the possibility of criminal charges, it only takes on disgruntled gambler and one motivated lawyer to launch a class action, in any state where gambling is legal.
Or in every single state where gambling is legal.
Complain about the civil justice system if you want (and those with money and power always do), but it is a mechanism for forcing change. For holding the responsible to account. For turning a wrong into a right.
And to most something seems wrong — or at a minimum fishy — about Burrow wearing a wrap on his hand, about the team posting and then deleting video of it, and about Burrow coincidentally suffering a season-ending injury to that same hand the next night.
Why was the video deleted? Get a truthful answer to that question, and you potentially have the fuel for a massive lawsuit against the Bengals and the NFL. The simple reality is that a lawsuit might be the only way to get a truthful answer to that question.
