The truth is, I’m not a big fan of these, “I told you so,” posts. Trouble is, not too many people will point out my hits for me, so you I sort of have to do it myself, even if I come off as a bit of a prick. To his credit, injury expert at Footballguys, Jene Bramel was kind enough to do a little boasting for me, but I’ll still take the liberty of doing it for myself here.
Bears WR Kevin White has had a mysterious injury since July. First it was entirely undisclosed, and later it was simply referred to as a shin injury. By reading between the lines, I speculated that the best fit, based upon what we knew, was that White had a tibia stress fracture. I wrote it up August 5th, here. Other people sort of threw around the idea of a possible stress injury, but I went bold with it by narrowing it down to one specific diagnosis. As it turns out, it was a beautiful call. Today, news came out that White has a tibia stress fracture and that he will undergo surgery and begin the season on the PUP list.
What I really love about this story is the strange turn it took yesterday. I was still pretty confident in my diagnosis, or at least as confident as you can be when you’re not a doctor or have any inside sources and you’re just working off an NFL injury database that you built yourself which might or might not spotlight your own mental illness. But yesterday, Rich Campbell of the Chicago Tribune wrote up this piece, which included these lines:
In his first public comments since the injury, White was upbeat with a good sense of humor. He was adamant there is no stress fracture in his shin.
So here was White actively denying the very thing that I thought he had. There’s no shame in admitting that I started doubting my diagnosis. But everything still fit right. Had White made his denial after actually playing on the field, I would have written this one off as a loss for me. My only consolation was that White was still ridiculously vague on what the injury really was, referring to it as, “a shin.” I love it when they do that.
Anyway, this is all just a long-form piece for me to take some credit. If you read this far, you have a really strong constitution. Nice work, you. And nice work me, I guess.
