It's Silly to Say NFL Players Are Injury Prone
Video 8/29/22
It’s funny when people talk about anybody being injury prone in football. It is just kind of silly.
It’s like saying you are accident-prone in NASCAR. It’s going to happen at some point. The people who don’t get injured at running back are more of an exception than the rule. It’s on individual cases. It depends on how much residual impact there is from a previous injury, and how much it may have changed a player's gate.
For example, are they putting pressure on some other joints in trying to compensate? I don’t think it’s impossible for a guy to be injured early in his career and not have injuries later in his career because I did it. I tore my ACL in my rookie season, had a high ankle sprain in my third season and in my fourth season, and on the other knee, I had an MCL and PCL tear.
In my last four years though, I was relatively healthy.
It’s certainly possible. You change some things depending on how that injury happens. For me, that first injury was right along the sideline when I stepped out of bounds and leaned back into a player. That player pushed as I leaned back in and all my weight went over my right knee and tore the ACL. I became a lot more careful near the sidelines and never had another injury on the sidelines or anything like that later in my career.
It’s an individual case where you are looking at how the injury happened. I don’t think that just because a player had injuries earlier in their career that they’re always going to get them.