Over the last few days, there have been a number of injuries to the ACL of some NFL players. To find out what this means, I will show what effect it has on a player and who has had it before.
But first, what is an ACL.
ACL stands for Anterior Cruciate Ligament. It is one of four ligaments in the knee that keeps the joint stable. When you bust your ACL, you have the sensation that your legs have given out from under you. When this sensation occurs, you lose more of your knee cartilage due to feeling like you are falling and forcing your leg down. The sudden high pressure contact to the knee causes extreme pain as shown by Bradys screams as he went down from Pollards tackle.
Next, what Sports Stars, particularly Gridiron players have suffered a torn ACL.
Jerry Rice (NFL hall of famer)
Willis McGahee
Carson Palmer (Current QB for the Bengals)
Jamaal Anderson
Lee Evans WR, Buffalo.
Tiger Woods. He won a major with a torn ACL, but was playing a sport with less bodily contact and requires less mobility between shots/plays.
Now, 2 other players have suffered this injury and another has suffered a lesser version after tearing their MCL (Vince Young)
Tom Brady and Nate Burleson can take some sort of comfort in the fact that the majority of players that have surgery recover from their injury within a year with little side effect.
Quote:
Data were analyzed for 31 players with 33 ACL injuries. Of the injured-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
players, 21 percent (7 of 33 ACL injuries) never returned to play in another
regular season NFL game. Of the 79 percent that did return, most players
returned to action 9 to 12 months after an ACL injury.
For those players who
returned to NFL action following an ACL injury, performance fell by one-third,
the researchers found. Power rating per game played decreased from 9.9
pre-injury to 6.5 post-injury. This decline in player production was
statistically significant when compared to the 146 players in the control group.
Knee pain, stiffness, loss of strength, deconditioning and reduced
proprioception (the sense of knowing where your leg is) may be factors
explaining the loss of production in players after an ACL injury, the authors
theorize. Further, ACL reconstruction does not perfectly recreate the complex
anatomy and composition of a person's ACL before injury.
Interestingly,
prior to their injury the ACL-injured players performed better than did
controls. "High-performance RBs and WRs are more likely to be injured because
they compete in more plays per game, carry the ball longer on each play, and
attract more defensive attention," the authors say. "The same qualities of RBs
and WRs that contribute to high performance -- instantaneous decelerations as
well as explosive pivoting and cutting maneuvers -- may increase the risk for
ACL injury."
The researchers cite a recent survey of all 31 NFL team
physicians who were asked to quantify "what percentage of players return to play
in the NFL after ACL reconstruction." Ninety percent of team physicians
responded "90 to 100 percent" of players (assuming not borderline talent) return
to the NFL. The current study found the number of players who return to play
after an ACL injury was actually less, at 79 percent.
So will Brady and Burleson recover to be back to their best to score more touchdowns than ever before, or will their careers fade into obscurity as they fade from the limelight wishing that they could have one last chance.
Thats all for this time.
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