What 'Questionable' Actually Means on an NFL Injury Report

Malik Nabers is questionable for the Giants' season opener against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night, GiantsGator reported Thursday, despite full practice participation Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. A clean practice week usually clears a player outright. It didn't here, and that gap between "practiced fully" and "still questionable" is the actual mechanics worth explaining.

What 'questionable' means, per NFL policy

The NFL's Game Status Report has three categories, defined in the league's Personnel (Injury) Report Policy: out means a player will not play, doubtful means he's unlikely to play, and questionable means it's uncertain whether he'll play. None of the three carries an attached percentage. Older breakdowns still circulate — a 50% chance for questionable, 25% for doubtful — but those numbers aren't part of current policy. They're leftovers from a fourth category, probable, that the league eliminated in 2016 after finding that about 95% of players listed probable ended up playing. The label wasn't telling anyone anything, so the NFL cut it and rewrote the other three in plain qualitative terms instead of percentages.

How the practice report feeds into it

Before the Friday Game Status Report, teams file a Practice Report on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Players are marked "Did Not Participate" for zero reps, "Limited Participation" for anything short of a full load, or "Full Participation" for a normal week. A player who logs Full Participation all three days and still isn't cleared on Friday — Nabers' situation — means the practice record itself isn't in question. What's in question is something the practice report can't capture: whether a knee still working back from a major injury is ready for game contact, not just practice reps.

That's a different kind of uncertainty than a player who was limited or absent all week. The Giants' own report bore this out — Nabers was the only Giant with a designation at all this week, while a handful of other players with reported ailments practiced fully and drew no designation, because there was nothing left to question about them.

Why a strong practice week doesn't settle it

Practice contact and in-game contact aren't the same physical test. Full team reps establish that a player can run routes, cut and take normal practice-speed hits — they don't establish that his knee holds up against a full-speed, full-pads hit from an NFL defender. For an injury serious enough to have ended a season, that gap is exactly what "questionable" is built to flag: not incomplete information, but a genuine, unresolved judgment call that only gets made close to kickoff. Nabers has said the call is his, made together with the team's medical staff — which is itself consistent with how the designation works. Nothing in NFL policy requires a team to resolve "questionable" before the deadline that actually matters: the inactive list, filed 90 minutes before kickoff.

The Giants and Cowboys kick off Sunday night at 8:20 p.m. ET at MetLife Stadium.