The New England Patriots played 19 games last season and filed several injury reports each week. The only two times Tom Brady appeared on the injury report, he was designated as questionable due to a thigh injury.
According to his wife, though, Brady sustained a concussion last season. Gisele Bundchen told Charlie Rose on "CBS This Morning" that Brady "does have concussions."
"I just have to say, as a wife, I'm a little bit -- as you know, it's not the most, like -- let's say, [it's] an aggressive sport. Right? Football, like, he had a concussion last year. He has concussions, pretty much. I mean, we don't talk about it. But he does have concussions. And I don't really think it's a healthy thing for your body to go through that kind of aggression, like, all the time. That cannot be healthy for you, right? And I'm planning on having him be healthy and do a lot of fun things we when are like 100 [years old], I hope."
The revelation that Brady might have sustained a concussion at some point is not exactly shocking. Quarterbacks take vicious hits all the time and concussions also often result from repeated small blows to the head, of which quarterbacks take plenty as well.
The bigger news here would be Brady having a concussion and the Patriots not reporting it. Failure to properly disclose an injury has in the past occasionally resulted in the loss of a draft pick, though the Seahawks did not lose a pick for their failure to disclose Richard Sherman's MCL injury last season.
It's obviously not known if the NFL would consider the extemporaneous comments of a player's wife to be evidence of an injury that actually occurred, and it's not known if the "we" Gisele was referring to when she said "we don't talk about" meant the Patriots, or herself and Brady. The latter would mean that Brady concealed the injury from the team, rather than the team concealing it from the league, which would probably insulate the Patriots from any punishment.
