Kyle Shanahan got in a serious car accident. Broken nose, broken ribs, broken hand, forty stitches, a concussion that’s apparently been the hardest part of the whole recovery. That’s a lot. That’s a genuinely scary amount of stuff to go through, and I think sometimes we forget that before we get to the part where we start dissecting it.

Here’s where I land on this one, and I know not everybody’s going to agree with me. I don’t think we needed to know the details. I still don’t, really.

I keep seeing the same argument pop up. You’re a public figure, you’re an NFL head coach, you lose some of your privacy the second you step into that role. I don’t buy that. I don’t think getting into a car accident near your own house, on your own time, during a week off, is suddenly public property just because your job on Sundays is coaching a football team. There’s a difference between what happens on the field, in the building, in a press conference, that stuff is fair game, that’s the job. This wasn’t that. This was a guy driving home from a chiropractor appointment.

Now here’s the part that actually complicates my own take, and I want to be honest about that instead of pretending it’s simple. The team didn’t say anything for eleven days. Then there was a clerical error in the accident report that, for a minute there, made it look like the other driver might’ve been at fault when she wasn’t. And Shanahan, on his own, called a group of reporters into a room and corrected that. Said flat out, I hit her, this was on me, I don’t know why the report said what it said.

That matters to me. That matters a lot actually. Because my whole issue was never “don’t ever tell us anything.” My issue is with people feeling entitled to every private detail of someone’s life just because of what they do for a living. But the second there’s an inaccurate version of events floating out there, especially one that shifts blame onto someone else, that’s not privacy anymore. That’s just the truth. And Shanahan going out of his way to fix that instead of letting it sit uncorrected, I respect that. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered.

Here’s the other thing I think is worth pointing out, because it actually proves my whole point better than anything else. When the news first broke, there was nothing. No details, no explanation, just the fact that it happened. And when people don’t have real information, they fill in the blanks themselves. That’s just what happens. Speculation, rumors, people connecting dots that aren’t even there. That’s on us as much as it’s on anybody, we do that with everything.

But look at what happened once Shanahan actually spoke. He came out, admitted what happened, took responsibility, didn’t hide behind a statement written by somebody else. And we’re a couple weeks removed from that now and basically nobody’s talking about it anymore. It’s done. It’s over. Nobody’s still digging.

That’s the moral of the whole thing, really. If you’re honest with people, if you’re humble about it and you actually take responsibility, people are willing to forgive you and move on. It’s not complicated. But the second you hide it, or you deny it, or you act like everybody watching is an idiot who won’t notice, that’s when the public digs in and won’t let it go. Shanahan did the first thing. That’s why this is already old news.

So I guess where I actually come down is this. If you get hurt, if something happens to you off the field, on your own time, I don’t think the public is owed a play by play. I really don’t. But if something gets reported wrong, especially something that could unfairly affect someone else, you don’t get to just let that stand because correcting it is inconvenient. Shanahan didn’t do that. He corrected it. And honestly, that’s kind of the whole standard right there. Keep what’s yours yours. Just don’t lie about it.