All eyes are on Robert Griffin III as the football season kicks off, and the Redskins are already down 0-2. It has only been eight months since Griffin had surgery on the ACL and LCL in his right knee, and fans and medical experts alike are taking the team’s two losses as an indicator that he hasn’t had enough time to recover.
Dr. David Geier, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist from Charleston, South Carolina, gave his expert opinion on Griffin’s status: “In therapy, you work like crazy on quad strength and hamstring strength on all these different machines to get that back, and you try to replicate that with all these functional drills to replicate football. But at the end of the day, it’s not the reps on a football field. You can get traditional muscle strength back, but it’s that dynamic stability, that muscle strength of actually doing the motions on the field, that just takes time.”
So everyone is hoping that as Griffin gets back into to the rhythm of playing on the field, things will improve. However, his ability to run is also a concern, and orthopedic surgeon from Toronto, Tim Dwyer, says “he’ll probably be slower because he’s been through fairly massive surgery, and it’ll take tie for his muscle strength like hamstrings and quads to get back to normal.”
But the final piece of the puzzle is Griffin’s own confidence, and fans have noticed that he seems nervous or uneasy before games. “Confidence is the last thing to return, and if the athlete is tentative, they may not perform as well as normal,” said Dr. Robert Marx, professor of orthopedic surgery at Cornell University.
