Based on my last few posts, you might think I’m just a cynic who loves to doubt everyone’s rosy injury rehab timelines. You might be right. But even a callused pessimist like myself had to stop and chuckle at the latest news to come out of St. Louis. Rams’ head coach Jeff Fisher talked to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and of course the topic of QB Sam Bradford’s recovery from ACL reconstruction came up. Let’s just let Fisher speak for himself here:
“You’re not gonna hear a head coach say he has a player on his team that’s not ahead of schedule coming off an ACL. Everybody says they’re all ahead of schedule.”
So far, so good. He’s completely right, and it’s refreshing to finally hear a coach admit that. Then he goes ahead and says what you were hoping he wasn’t going to say:
“But he is realistically way ahead of schedule.”
Nice one. So Fisher admits that everyone is basically sort of lying, but then, at the same time, trying to tell you that he isn’t lying. Does this sound a little bit like a jumpy suspect in a police interrogation room admitting to all sorts of other crimes but insisting that he absolutely isn’t guilty of the one crime he was brought in for? I’d love to end this by saying that, with some organized team activities coming, we might soon have a clearer picture of where Bradford is at. The truth however is that the next few weeks of practice are about as limited as you can imagine, and we’ll probably just hear more generic fluff like Fisher’s comments. If nothing else, at least this year I’ll be ready to rip into those fluff quotes.
