Our guys are healthy (or maybe they're not)

For a guy who doesn't mind lying to others, Mike Shanahan certainly goes to great lengths to make sure others don't lie to him.

The Broncos coach drew headlines and the ire of NFL officials this week for admitting he fibbed by telling a CBS sideline reporter during Denver's game in San Diego that his quarterback, Jake Plummer, had a concussion instead of a separated right shoulder. It happened on a bootleg play midway through the second quarter.

Plummer was soon replaced by backup Steve Beuerlein, who finished off the 37-13 victory Sunday. After the game, Shanahan came clean, saying he put out the bogus injury report because he feared that if the Chargers knew Plummer's shoulder was injured they wouldn't worry about him passing if he came back into the game.

"If Steve went down on the first or second play and Jake went in there with a separated shoulder, they would know that we could not throw the football," Shanahan said. "So, for his sake and our sake I had to fib a little bit."

He got theNFL's attention

The NFL said it was reviewing the matter and still might punish Shanahan for violating a league policy requiring teams to provide "accurate injury information as quickly as possible to the network during a game."

Still, the coach was unrepentant.

"To report at halftime, go through all my injuries and explain to everybody, 'Hey this guy's got a sore ankle, this guy's got a sore chest, this guy's got a concussion,' so someone can game-plan me at halftime and know what we're going to do against the opposition?" Shanahan said. "That's ludicrous."

There might not be a coach in any sport, at just about any level, who wouldn't do the same thing to keep an opponent from gaining a competitive advantage. What's wrong with that?

This: Shanahan is one of about a half-dozen NFL coaches who've decided to tempt fate and keep just two quarterbacks on the roster instead of three. Had Beuerlein been knocked out of the game, the coach would have learned a hard lesson about messing with competitive advantages.

We'll call you

When Shanahan cut quarterbacks Jarious Jackson and Danny Kanell at the end of training camp, he explained his decision this way: "The third quarterback never gets any reps in practice; basically he's just standing around. You always talk about the pros and cons, what you might do if a guy goes down. We know who's out there and who we would call if we needed someone."

Sure enough, even though Plummer was already rehabbing his shoulder and is expected to play Monday night against the Raiders, the Broncos got in touch with Kanell and told him to be ready in case of an emergency.

While it's hardly news when a coach takes a bad risk, Shanahan might be the last guy you'd expect to find with his toes dangling over a ledge. The man is a control freak, so determined to stay on top of everything that he tapes every team meeting, even though he watches many of them live from his office on closed-circuit television.

On the other hand, his reluctance to share much of that information places him close to the middle of the pack in a profession every bit as secretive as the CIA. Especially when the subject is injuries.

Titans coach Jeff Fisher once went two years -- 32 straight regular-season games -- without ever listing a player as either "probable" or "doubtful" on an official injury report. Before he got forced out as coach in Jacksonville, ex-Marine Tom Coughlin was notorious for pretending that torn ligaments and broken bones were little more than "owies."

And it's not just pro football coaches who play fast and loose with medical facts. Their hockey counterparts are every bit as forgetful, especially around playoff time. Even more surprising is how willingly the players go along.

For most of the postseason in 1999, the Dallas Stars did nothing to discourage reports that the injury slowing down Brett Hull was a pulled groin. The idea was to keep opponents from going after his knee, a tradeoff that prompted this classic response from Derian Hatcher: "It's the same part of the body, I guess."

Or not.

"It's page three of the coaches' manual that you don't say anything," is how Toronto's Joe Nieuwendyk once explained the code of silence. "You say everybody is healthy ... and some guys are day-to-day."

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.