As a rabid Pats fan, I must admit, I love me some Chandler Jones. He’s one of those high-motor defensive ends that just manages to be everywhere he needs to be. Okay, maybe that’s pretty biased. But he does have a great smile, and that counts for a lot. Given all that, it kills me to hear that he has a hip injury that might sideline him for about a month, as reported by the Boston Globe’s Shalise Manza Young.
As a database guy though, what bugs me even more is that we have no clue what this injury is. Knowing the Patriots, we’ll never get a better idea either, unless maybe Jones himself pipes up. But, given my vast database, shouldn’t I be able to tell what Jones might have? Or at least narrow it down a little? Maybe.
Let’s say that estimate ends up being accurate and Jones misses a month (whole different tangent… does one month mean he misses three games or four? That’s why I try to be precise with my estimates). What sort of hip injuries would keep a player out for a month? We should be able to rule out some simple ones like hip pointers (basically bruises) and muscle strain. Trouble is, once you rule out the easy ones, you’re left with a lot of drastic possibilities, and those often come with a much, much longer timetable. Hip surgery of any type usually ends a season, so that rules out a lot of choices. What we’re left with in the hip category then is perhaps something like a severe hip flexor strain, an injury that kept CB Aqib Talib out for four weeks in 2013, though he later got all weird and ranty about the whole thing.
Given how secretive the Pats are on medical details, it’s worth mentioning that we could very well be looking at either a groin injury or even surgery to correct a sports hernia. The groin injury would fit the timetable pretty well, although four weeks would be a pretty optimistic spin on sports hernia surgery. And if you like your roster issues to stay clouded in fog, you could make the argument that the groin is part of the hip and that you’re not being misleading at all when you say hip. Sort of. It doesn’t sound right when I say it, but we’d all sort of roll our eyes and then grudgingly agree if Bill Belichick said it.
Before I go sounding too conspiratorial though, the biggest single possibility here is that it’s just a vague hip injury that we will never have any details or closure on. The Patriots have even established a precedence with this exact scenario. Kenbrell Thompkins missed three games with a never-specified hip injury in 2013. Steve Gregory missed five games with a never-specified hip injury in 2012. And Aaron Hernandez, he of who we shall never speak, missed three weeks with the same vague injury in 2010.
So really, all this database, all these words, and no enlightenment. Sorry folks, that’s The Patriot Way. (Still love you coach!)
