The 49ers' potential Christian McCaffrey-Jordan Mason injury report trickery deserves scrutiny

If the NFL is going to take money from sportsbooks to be a partner -- which it does — it shouldn't allow its teams deceive the customers of those sportsbooks who, by extension, are also the NFL's customers.

That's what appeared to happen Monday night when, fresh off the game of his life, San Francisco 49ers running back Jordan Mason revealed he knew as early as Friday he'd be starting in place of injured teammate Christian McCaffrey.

The problem with that, of course, is the rest of us didn't find out McCaffrey wouldn't be playing until the 49ers announced inactives one and a half hours before kickoff.

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Prior to the team ruling McCaffrey out, the reigning Offensive Player of the Year wasn't just expected to play, he was expected to receive a normal workload. The last-hour change left fantasy managers in a bind and allowed bettors to wager money on outcomes that were never a possibility — McCaffrey touchdowns were the two most popular prop bets of the game at BetMGM.

Those bettors were not happy.

The potential injury report trickery is also against league rules.

According to the NFL's 2017 personnel report policy, teams playing on Monday are required to provide game status reports by Saturday. So if the team knew on Friday that McCaffrey would be out, they had more than enough time to downgrade his status from questionable.

Kyle Shanahan's defense was that he never told Mason he was going to start: "I never told Jordan he was going to start. I told him he had to be ready a bunch." And it's certainly possible Mason misspoke. But if it's his word against Shanahan's, I lean towards believing the player who had nothing to gain from lying rather than a coach potentially engaging in gamesmanship.

Fortunately for most Niners bettors, the switch from McCaffrey to Mason didn't hurt the team at all. He ran for 147 yards and a touchdown, and the team still won and covered the four-point spread comfortably. Though it was surely an annoyance for anyone who might have bet on Mason's props and didn't get the opportunity, any bets on McCaffrey should have been voided. No harm, no foul.

However, this should be enough for the NFL to look into potential violations by the 49ers and penalize them as such, and monitor potential violations in the future more closely. It's only a matter of time before something like this flips a line and causes a real stir.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: The 49ers' potential Christian McCaffrey-Jordan Mason injury report trickery deserves scrutiny