The Laws › Injuries and availability
Injuries and availability
Questionable usually means playing
Questionable mostly means playing. Since the league dropped the Probable tag, Questionable has become the catch-all for guys who are banged up but expected to suit up, and more than half of them do, every single year. Do not auto-bench a player just because you saw the Q.
What the record says
Each bar is one season. Green bars point the same way as the overall result, pink bars point against it. Recent seasons count for more in the typical size, which is measured on the scale of the check behind this rule, so compare it across the seasons here rather than across different rules.
How we know
When Probable was retired in 2016, its population of expected-to-play players had to go somewhere, and it flowed into Questionable. The tag now spans everyone from true coin-flips to near-locks, so the tag's aggregate play rate sits comfortably above one half. Teams also carry incentives to list liberally, further stuffing Questionable with players who were always going to play.
We check this the same way every time: run the claim against every season from 2016 to 2025 in the play-by-play record, one season at a time, and grade it on how often the seasons agree. This one came back the same way in 10 of 10 seasons.
The claim, stated precisely
In the modern injury-report regime (2016-2025 REG, after the Probable designation was retired), a QB, RB, WR, or TE listed Questionable goes on to record a stat line that week more often than not: the play rate exceeds one half in every season, measured 54.7 to 68.4 percent.
Related laws
- RefinesQuestionable and playing means a discountHolds up
- Refines thisMissed practice is the real red flagHolds up
Read the essay
- The Injury Report, DecodedQuestionable usually means playing. Knees haunt a season more than hamstrings do. And a concussion listing is the one tag where the decision is out of the coach's hands.
FanIQ carries this rule into the app, where it lands on the actual players, teams, and games you are looking at.
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- Checked by FanIQ against 25 seasons of play-by-play, game, roster, and box-score records.