Cole Kmet was out for the season. He was also in the lineup.

On Friday afternoon the official word on Cole Kmet was about as plain as an injury report gets: out for the rest of the season. A couple of hours later Tyler Warren was ruled out of Sunday's game at Minnesota. By Sunday night Injury Prone had lost to the Crimson Tide, 108.1 to 91.8, and the league scoreboard showed Kmet in the starting tight end spot with a zero beside his name.

This is the kind of night when a reporter can make a sentence sound more final than the evidence allows. So here is what I know, and here is what I don't.

What I know: Warren was on the Colts' inactive list Sunday morning and sat on the Injury Prone bench. Kmet, the veteran Joey McVey brought in to back Warren up, started and scored nothing. Tommy Tremble was active for Carolina, sat on the Injury Prone bench and scored 1.3 points. Injury Prone are 4-3 and have lost two straight.

What I don't know is why the lineup looked the way it did.

McVey answered my question about the tight end room on Sunday night, on the record. "Tommy got the start with Tyler out and it was a quiet day, not what I wanted," he wrote. "One quiet day doesn't change what I think of him."

That is not what the league scoreboard shows. The scoreboard is the record of who started, and it has Kmet at tight end and Tremble on the bench. Maybe McVey meant something narrower than it reads; Tremble did play for the Panthers, and "a quiet day" is a fair description of his afternoon either way. But I asked about his lineup, and his lineup says something different. I'm not going to fill that gap with a guess. I'll ask him about it this week and print what he tells me.

Here is why it matters to me. Last Tuesday, in email answers to the questions I'd sent him, McVey laid out the order of his tight end room as clearly as any owner has laid out anything on this beat. "Tyler's my starter when he's healthy, Cole's next, Tommy's right behind him," he wrote. And: "If he can't, Cole starts and nobody in my building blinks."

On Tuesday that was a sound plan. I watched practice that afternoon from outside, and Kmet was working as the No. 2 tight end behind Warren, with Tremble down with the third group. "Cole's been a starting tight end in this league for years and I brought him in for exactly this week," McVey wrote.

Then Friday happened. An injury report is not the whole truth about a player's body, and I don't pretend it is. But it is the whole truth about one thing: who is available. "Out for the rest of the season" is not a word that needs interpreting. The order McVey gave me on Tuesday was built for a week when Kmet was healthy. By Sunday, he wasn't.

Here's my take, and it is a take: the zero at tight end did not lose this game. The gap was more than 16 points, and Tremble's afternoon wouldn't have closed it. Matthew Stafford, Jonathan Taylor and Kyren Williams each put up about 18, and the Tide simply had more. My colleague Ben Carter has that side of the story, and Crimson Tide owner Jon Rudolph was gracious about it. "They're a good club and Stafford can hurt you," he wrote after the game. "Tremble didn't get loose today, and I was glad of that."

But a team called Injury Prone, of all teams, can't treat the injury report as background noise. It's the first document anyone in this building should read on a Friday, and it's the one that told everyone Kmet's season was over. Whatever happened between that report and Sunday's kickoff, the result was a starter who could not play.

McVey isn't standing still, by his own account. "Tight end is a spot I'll keep working on while Tyler's out," he wrote Sunday, adding that I'd see what he does when it's official. "Nothing before that." I know of no move, and I won't guess at one.

There's one more line from those Tuesday emails worth holding up to the light. After the loss to the Wild Cards, by less than two points, McVey wrote: "We're 4-2, first in Delta, and we don't lose two in a row. You can print that." He asked me to print it, so I am. Owners say things like that after close losses. It is now two in a row.

The good news for Injury Prone is that they still lead the Delta. The Inexperienced Blitz are 3-3 and trail Dandy with Dallas Goedert left to play Monday night; if Goedert has a big night, the Blitz pull even.

The rest depends on Tyler Warren. The next official word on his status will tell us more about this tight end room than anything said on Sunday night, including by me.