One of the coolest stories of the first weekend of Week 1 was San Francisco 49ers running back Jordan Mason stepping up to make the first start of his career. It might also end up becoming the first big controversey of the season.
Christian McCaffrey was ruled inactive at the last minute, which opened the door fo Mason to start. After the game, ESPN's Lisa Salters conducted what appeared to be an innocent interview with Mason about his big night but might have accidentally stumbled upon a rules violation.
Mason mentioned that Friday was when he knew he'd be starting, which would indicate the Niners knew McCaffrey would be out. It's a major gray area, but the extremely aggressive way Mason answered a follow-up question about the same topic at the podium just moments later suggests something fishy is afoot.
If any of that sounds familiar to Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans, it's because the team went through an almost identical situation with Devin White last season.
49ers might be in the same hot water Tampa Bay was last season with Devin White
Before Week 15's win over the Packers, White was made a surprise inactive despite it appearing as though he was healthy enough to play. There were other factors as well, like the fact that White had lost his starting job, and the team might have been covering for him refusing to play. That isn't neccessarily a rules violation, but the clumsy way Todd Bowles and the Bucs explained why White was inactive got them into hot water with the league.
Bowles said that the team knew White was going to be out as early as Saturday, but that wasn't what showed up on the final injury report of the week. If teams know a player isn't going to play, they are required by the league to report that for the sake of competitive balance.
The Bucs didn't do that, and while the league didn't ultimately punish the team there was an investigation launched to see what happened.
San Francisco's situation with McCaffrey and Mason seems like the deal. If the Niners knew on Friday that McCaffrey wasn't going to play, they needed to report that then and not a half hour before kickoff. Where they have a bit of wiggle room around potential punishment is how Mason phrased things in his interview with Salters.
He didn't say that McCaffrey wasn't going to play, he simply said he knew he'd be starting. That's not illegal, and there's no rule that mandates the Niners must start certain players over others. That being said, one doesn't have to squint very hard to read between the lines, which is where things bump up against the rules.
Technically, the 49ers didn't do anything wrong, just like how technically the Bucs' biggest sin last year with the White situation was overexplaining things. San Francisco might have learned a lesson from that, as they clearly clamped down on the messaging and pulled Mason aside to ensure he didn't say anything that could get them in trouble.
No punishment was handed down to the Bucs last year, and it's unlikely that anything will happen here, but the similarity between the two situations is too uncanny to ignore.
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