Jim Schwartz's Coy Attitude on Injuries Creating a Motown Monster

(Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Does anybody know how bad Matthew Stafford's knee injury is?

Does anybody know when anybody on the Detroit Lions' injury list will be available to play?

Yes. The players, the training staff, and head coach Jim Schwartz.

But nobody else.

What started as a smart tactic of withholding all but the most essential injury information to cloud opponents' game-planning has become a behemoth of misinformation.

It seems that Schwartz's philosophy with injury is that everybody is either out for the season or day-to-day and a game-time decision.

Of course, that's a lie.

He knew Stafford and Calvin Johnson wouldn't be ready to go against the Packers. He knows what each player's injury is, the severity of it, and how long it will keep them out.

But you'll never hear him say, "It looks like Stafford's injury will keep him out for two or three weeks." At best, he'll rule a guy out of Sunday's game on Thursday or Friday.

That was fine for a while. Lions fans would watch whoever showed up to play, anyway. Anything that might improve the Lions' chance for a win was okay.

But now it has gotten out of hand.

To compensate for Schwartz's lack of information, we are now seeing a flood of misinformation.

Now there are reports about Stafford possibly needing knee surgery.

And rebuttals to said report.

And speculation about the future of Stafford's season.

And even confusion as to whether or not Stafford is practicing because of fake Twitter accounts.

If Stafford doesn't play against the Rams after the bye, things only figure to get worse.

Next we might see a photoshopped picture of Stafford's severed leg on the turf.

The sad thing is, fans are so in the dark about Stafford's injury, they might believe his leg has actually fallen off.

Keeping opponents off-balance by playing the injury report close to the vest is one thing. It's a good idea.

But this has gotten out of hand. Nobody knows whether Stafford is going to back on the field in a day or a year.

And is it worth it? Is Schwartz getting enough of a leg up on opposing coaches to justify throwing the entirety of the Lions fan base into purgatory about the players they pay to see play football?

It's not just Stafford. I can buy that Schwartz isn't sure about Stafford's knee just yet.

He had complications, so they're having Dr. James Andrews look at his MRI. I have my doubts as to whether we'll hear anything concrete about the results, but I'll believe he doesn't know much right now.

But Schwartz is playing every single injury like this. Ernie Sims.  Calvin Johnson. Sammie Lee Hill.  Dewayne White. Grady Jackson. Gosder Cherlius.

All of them, the same thing. To paraphrase everything Schwartz has ever said about an injury, "We're going to see if they can practice, and if they're good to go, they'll play. It'll be a game-time decision."

Right. A game-time decision that he has made by Thursday.

At 1-5 and coming off an embarrassing shutout loss, the Lions should have shaken any straggling asylum-dwellers of the notion that the Lions are playing for the playoffs this year.

So at the very least, maybe they can show the fans a dim glimmer of information regarding the guys on the injured list to slow this downward spiral of misinformation?

The attachment of Matthew Stafford's leg might depend on it.

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