When the Chicago Bears released/injured long snapper Patrick Scales (Scales suffered a season ending knee injury in last week’s Tennessee Titans pre-season game), a lot of fans were thinking “wow, he gets injured and the Bears just cut him, that’s COLD!”
On the surface, it does look cold... but in reality, the Bears really didn’t have much of a choice because of how the league rules work.
I’m going to work through my understanding of how all of this works, based on research that I have been doing. It’s pretty technical stuff, and the NFL does a VERY poor job of explaining it’s rules, so here’s what I came up with regarding the various types of ways players are released/waived/cut.