Kansas City Chiefs RB Jamaal Charles put up a blog post with a surprising amount of detail about his attempted recovery from last year’s ACL and what brought on the decision to shut him down this year.
The key takeaway: Jamaal Charles says he wants to keep playing. He’s under contract with the Chiefs for one more season at a $7 million cap hit.
There was a whole lot of information here from Jamaal on what his injury was, how it went down and how they responded to it.
The key passage on what happened at the time of the injury:
When I came back in Week 4, I needed to shake some rust off. But two weeks later, I was feeling good. I thought that since I had a good game against Oakland, maybe I could do extra stuff before and after practice to get even better, and that kind of backfired on me. The week after the Raiders game, we got into practice, and everything was going normally. Afterward, I stayed out doing some more extra work. Nobody was really out there besides the running backs, everybody had gone back in, just the running back coaches and the running backs were still outside. There were 5-10 of us at most.
We were running through some drills, and when I went to make a cut, my leg just locked up. It wasn’t painful—there was just something weird about it. It locked up, and I couldn’t walk. I had to be carted off the field. They did an MRI, but you couldn’t tell what was going on or what was wrong with me. After you have a knee surgery like I had, it’s hard to tell from an MRI what’s going on. I just knew for myself that even after they worked on my leg, something wasn’t right. I wasn’t the same.
Eventually he went on to Dr. James Andrews, which was reported during that time. That trip was in October. He was put on IR in November with half the season to go.
It’s supposed to be 6-7 weeks from that type of procedure until you can come back and play, so when I asked if there was a possibility I could come back and play this year, Dr. Andrews said, “Yeah, it’s a possibility.” That was with eight games to go. The team put me on injured reserve, and we talked about it, and decided to have him clean out the other knee as well. That one wasn’t as bad, but there was some stuff in there. It made sense to do it so I could just heal up and go out there feeling the same way in both knees, just completely ready.
This passage is the kicker: he still wants to play.
What I do know is that I still want to play football. I’m only 29 years old. My goal right now is to just focus on the now and my rehab and let the rest sort itself out later.
Jamaal is under contract next season with the Chiefs. They could bring him back. They could cut him. Work something else out? Sounds like everything is on the table.
Tons of detail in his post. Go read it.