In case you didn’t know, Chris Cooley has been placed on the Washington Redskins’ injured reserve. That knee of his has been bugging him for over a year now, and though he was pretty optimistic about it, the reality was that it was bad enough to sideline him for the rest of the season.
But Cooley found the real culprit for his sidelining: The lockout. Here’s a quote from Cooley via the Washington Post:
“I feel 100 percent – and I’m not blaming anybody. I feel one hundred percent that I am a casualty for the season, of the lockout,” Cooley said. “I think it was a shame that they didn’t let players who had surgery spend time with the doctors and trainers that they trust on a daily basis. I wish I could’ve. I think what I went through in July, I could’ve went through in March. I started doing things and it slowly swelled up and I wasn’t here. I can ice it at home and do things at home … But I’ve never been through it before.”
The dude makes sense; however, I never heard Chris Cooley talk about the NFL lockout the past seven weeks since the season began, because in that time, pretty much everyone speculated that injuries were abundant thanks to the lockout keeping players out of shape.
And injuries are, indeed, abundant. Currently, there are 238 players on the IR list in 2011 through seven weeks of football. Last year? There were just under 350 total through 16 games per team. Considering roughly 68 percent of last year’s injuries have been accomplished through just 43 percent of this season, that’s a significant jump.
Still, on an individual level, Cooley would’ve been smart to be tentative about his return to football this year. He shouldn’t have come back so soon if he felt his knee was still pretty dodgy. It’s illogical to come back to playing a sport like football when your knee can’t handle the hits or pressure it’s supposed to take. Let it heal, stupid.
It is pretty sad to see Cooley’s season end that way, though; dude’s a legitimate option at tight end and provides the (ailing and awful) Washington Redskins with more of an offensive repertoire.
Ha! And you thought the Redskins’ season couldn’t get any worse.
