The best and only way to have handled that is to be honest. An explanation that would have been true and accepted by all would have been as follows"
"Todd has arthritic inflammation in his knee that comes and goes. When it flares up it affects his performance. When it doesn't he's still a dangerous tailback that can win games for us. There will be times when he simply can't play and there are other days when it doesn't flare up and he's good to go. We just have to go game by game. "
Then again maybe they didn't want other teams to know that either not wanting to hurt Todd's career or maybe even trying to get some capital via a trade or something.
