Anterio Thompson Was on the Non-Football Injury List, and We Left It There

On Thursday, Anterio Thompson wrote on Instagram that he has been told he will never play football again.

"Mentally, I've been better than anyone would be in my situation," he wrote, in a passage ESPN published Friday night. "I was told I would never play football again due to a genetic mutation in my spinal cord that I had no idea about."

He added: "As a football player you know one day you'll have to hang up your cleats but you just hope it's on your own terms."

That is the whole of the medical record in public. He did not name a condition, and no reporting has. I am not going to supply one.

Thompson is 24. Atlanta drafted him in the sixth round in April, No. 208 overall, out of Washington, and he has never played a regular-season snap. On April 29 the club published a feature about him headlined "Anterio Thompson was nearly out of football; now he's an Atlanta Falcon". He says he was diagnosed in early May.

Since the summer he has been on the non-football injury list. Per NFL.com's roster FAQ, it covers injuries and illnesses that happened outside NFL activities -- a classification of where a condition came from, not of how serious it is. A player still on it when the roster is set at 53 goes to reserve/NFI, misses at least the first four games, and does not count against the active limit.

Here is what the filing discloses, on the club's own ledger. On July 29 the Falcons placed two defensive linemen on the active/NFI list in a single transaction: Zach Harrison and Anterio Thompson. Harrison was elevated on September 19 for the home opener against Carolina, signed to the active roster on September 22, and is listed Active on ESPN's roster this morning. Thompson is the only name in the "Reserve/Non-Football Injury" table on the club's roster page.

Nobody reading that July row could have known which of the two it would be. The row was accurate, and it stayed accurate for six months. It was never built to say anything else, and it didn't.

On Friday, before the post had circulated publicly, head coach Kevin Stefanski was asked about Thompson and said he had no update -- ESPN's account of the exchange, in reported speech, with none of his words quoted. ESPN also reports that before the post, no information about the injury had been released by either Thompson's camp or the Falcons. As of this morning the club had published nothing explaining it. Its news index, which carries this week's injury report and previews of Sunday's game, holds one Thompson item: the feature from April.

Which brings me to our own copy. His name moved through this desk's signal stream fourteen times between April and this week, and into six published pieces, four of them mine. In April I gave him a paragraph about his 9.36 Relative Athletic Score and wrote that he might never start. On September 2 I wrote this: "An eighth, defensive tackle Anterio Thompson, is on the non-football injury list, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution." I had the designation eight weeks before he posted, sourced to somebody else, and spent it as a roster detail in a paragraph about cutdowns. On October 5 he was two words in a list of absences I was using to argue about a depleted front. Four days later I subtracted his name from a count of available defenders, and the arithmetic was right.

Nobody could have known what the list meant; the July row proves that. I never asked what had put him on it.

Where he had gone has been on the record since the summer. What had happened to him came from him, on Thursday.