The News on AJ Brown's Ankle Sprain is So Far, So Good

You can count me among the Patriots fans who saw our lives flash before our eyes on the opening drive on the 2nd half last night. On a simple 3rd down pass. The sort of throw Drake Maye made with supreme confidence and accuracy last year, but was practically impossible last night. It wasn't enough that they had to punt and miss the chance to open a two-score lead. But we got tortured with one of those scenes where a Pro Bowl player is grabbing a Pro Bowl part of his body, and you're forced to cut to a series of ads for cars, insurance, and Peyton Manning's dietary habits that seems to last forever. 

If your life wasn't passing before your eyes, you might have at least had visions of Gordon Heyward, coming to Boston on a sweet free agency deal. And then five minutes into his Celtics career, seeing his leg twisted like an action figure in the backyard of Sid from Toy Story. Only 0.0001% less gruesome. 

Or perhaps you had flashbacks of the Pats 2018 draft class, who lost their first pick, left tackle Isaiah Wynn for the year in a preseason game, then saw Duke Dawson, Ja’Whaun Bentley, Christian Sam, Braxton Berrios, and Ryan Izzo wind up IR'ed as well. That team went on to win the Super Bowl with Trent Brown at LT, so no one really wasted much time at all worrying about them. 

But Brown is a bigger deal than Heyward or six draft picks. He is the vessel into which I've poured a significant amount of my hopes and dreams for a bright future. He's the guy I'm counting on to make me forget the days when the top receivers on this team were Jakobi Meyers or Kendrick Bourne. Plus all your Gordons, Sanus, Parkers and Smith-Schusters, who kept costing us draft picks, while never producing a thing. 

So yes, seeing all those dreams go up in the smoke of volcanic hellfires was too much to bear, whether or not the Pats beat Seattle. But the good news is that it looks promising right now:

Me:

Giphy Images.

Giphy Images.

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I get it. This doesn't mean we're out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. We've seen X-rays miss things before. And misdiagnoses. And injuries that turned out to be more severe than first thought. But if this really was out-for-the-season serious, we'd know by now. And it appears that the Pats dodged a bullet, even if it did clip them a little. 

It's always an applause like to say the US healthcare system is broken and needs to be fixed. Whether that's true or not, at a moment like this I always turn to the unsung heroes of the medical profession. Internet doctors who offer diagnosis on patients they watched on TV and have never met, much less examined. So let's check with the social media experts:

…distributed through the high (syndesmotic) and medial (deltoid) ligaments. The deltoid ligament was stronger and held up, the high-ankle wasn’t.  

Likely could have been much worse. 

Personally, that for me is just the right combination of hope, optimism, and sounding like you know what you're talking about by using obscure, unpronounceable jargon to project authority. I'm buying it.

But just in case you'd rather get a second opinion, here's my referral:

These guys don't spend eight years in internet medical school just to not be taken seriously. When they tell us Brown is out a matter of a few weeks, I choose to put my fate in their hands. 

So best case scenario, Brown misses the Steelers game at Foxboro in nine days. The middle ground has him missing that on plus the Jaguars, Bills, and Raiders. The worst case? He misses those as well as the Jets and Bears, and he's back by Halloween. 

Even if we apply my patented Jerry Injury Projection Math, where I take the high end and add 50%, that still brings Brown back by Week 11 against the Lions in Germany. Next comes the Bye week, and the stretch run for the playoffs, which included the Chargers, Bills again, Chiefs and Broncos. 

We'll have a better idea soon enough. But for now, I suggest we all take comfort in the knowledge this could've been much, much worse. 

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Let's get these two back together as soon as possible. The football gods demand it.

(It's the opposite of my patented Jerry Tabloid Weather Report Winter Storm Projection, where I take the low estimate of the snow accumulation and cut it in half. Both rarely ever steer me wrong.)