Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion! Let me introduce you to, “The King of Convalescence,” the, “Duke of Doubtful,” the, “Sultan of Sitting,” the, “Dictator of Deactivation,” … St Louis Rams cornerback Trumaine Johnson!
This probably falls into the category of, “more interesting to me than to the reader,” but I’m posting it anyway because it’s history in the making. As of today, October 27th, Trumaine Johnson has smashed all of my database records by sitting out nine (9!) games with an MCL sprain. He missed the final preseason game and has been inactive for all seven regular season games. Plus that week four bye. So yeah, we’re looking at nine weeks that he’s missed with this injury, and I can’t find anything saying that he’s close to returning. When he went down back in August, the rehab timeline was estimated at about six weeks:
MRI revealed a sprained MCL for Rams corner Trumaine Johnson. Likely a 6 week timetable
— Jason La Canfora (@JasonLaCanfora) August 24, 2014
MCL sprains are an injury I have pretty well covered in my database. I have records on 31 players who suffered this injury between 2010 and the end of the 2013 season. The average return is after missing 2.35 weeks, and almost all of them are back by about four weeks. In fact, of those 31 players, only two missed more than five weeks. LT Roger Saffold missed missed seven weeks with an MCL sprain back in 2012. RB Javon Ringer technically missed 12 games in 2012 with the injury, but it’s thought that he was so far buried in the depth chart that the team put him on the IR shelf just to free up some space, not because his injury was that significant.
Where does that leave us with Trumaine Johnson? We know that he’s a starting-caliber CB and that St. Louis needs him back. That rules out a depth chart issue (meaning that he truly is injured as opposed to some questionable roster manipulation). So either Johnson has the most severe MCL sprain that we’ve seen in recent times, or he has a more serious injury. I’m not smart enough to tell you which option is correct. A big part of the purpose of my database is to catch and note injury outliers like this, so I’m not going to just write this off as a more serious knee injury masquerading as an MCL sprain. But it does bear watching, as this simply is not adding up.
