In the words of Ron Burgandy, “boy, that escalated quickly.” (Crap, I can’t take credit for that… Rotoworld used it lo lead their summary of Jones’ injury, and they nailed it.) Back on October 21st, word came out that Pats DE Chandler Jones would miss, “about a month,” with a hip injury. No details were given, leaving me to speculate here on what the injury and prognosis really was. My feeling was that there weren’t really any hip injuries that fit the bill here. Based on my records, hip injuries tend to be either minor or severe, with little room in between. Either you miss you zero time or you miss tons of time, but you rarely miss about a month. I speculated that perhaps Jones’ injury was more of a groin injury and was being labeled with a vague hip designation, and that, whatever it was, there was a good chance we’d simply never know the truth, as the Pats are pretty tight-lipped on this stuff.
A few days ago, the plot thickened. The Boston Herald’s Jeff Howe reported that Jones would likely miss at least six weeks, and possibly the rest of the season. That’s fantastic news… for me. Sort of. As a Pats fan, I want Jones back quickly. But as an injury stat nerd, this newest wrinkle shines some light on the situation, even if the Pats are unwilling to talk about it. When the window changed from, “about a month,” to, “six weeks to the rest of the season,” it drastically changed the possible injuries we’re looking at here. With this longer, uncertain timeline it’s now matching much closer to previous cases of hip dislocation or hip labrum injuries. Both of those tend to do serious structural damage and both almost always require surgery and extensive rehab. This surgery is not at all like the comparatively-minor “knee scope,” that players can come come back from in a week or two if they’re lucky.
Looking at my database, I have to think Jones is done for the season. Nobody really comes back from this sort of thing so late in the season. Occasionally players try to play through hip labrum tears and put the surgery off until after the season, such as Ed Reed did in 2009. But it should be noted that Reed’s approach wasn’t successful, as his delay in surgery only screwed up his following season, leading him to start his year on the physically unable to preform list for the first six games. With that Boston Herald report about the Pats understanding the possible season-ending implications here, you’ve got to think that the team is going to make the conservative move and put Jones on the shelf soon, thereby hoping to have him back in full for the 2015 season. I don’t think I’m really going out on a limb here, but my guess is we’ll see Jones moved to the IR list this week in order to free up some roster space. Seems to me like it would be too risky to keep him around in the hopes of bringing him back too early just for some late season QB pressure.
