Former offensive lineman Jamaal Jackson once said, “Your first day in the league is the last day you’ll ever be 100% healthy.” No muscle, ligament, joint, tendon or organ is safe. Sooner or later, every NFL player will end up in the training room and on the weekly injury report.

Some NFL teams are more forthcoming with injury information than others and we rarely get enough details to know exactly what injury a player has, what the treatment may be or how much time he’ll miss. Still, having a working understanding of the most common football-related injuries is a worthwhile undertaking.

In this series of posts, I’ll look at how the most common and severe football injuries occur, how they’re treated and how soon you can expect a player to recover and return to play. I’ll cover the mostly straight-forward (shoulder separations, torn ACL, broken clavicles), the often not-at-all straightforward (Lisfranc injuries, meniscus tears, plantar fasciitis) and the highly controversial (concussion).

I’ll also discuss new orthobiologic treatments that are gaining popularity (e.g. platelet-rich plasma, stem cell therapies, etc) and some of the more common pain-killing injections players receive during the week. If there’s interest, we’ll do a mailbag feature at the end of the series to tie up any loose ends.

Categories: Navigating Injury Report Series