September 24, 2024
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Eagles WR A.J. Brown on the sideline during Week 3's game against the Saints in New Orleans last Sunday. Brown didn't dress due to a hamstring injury.
A.J. Brown sat out the Eagles' past two games and is likely to miss at least one more approaching the bye – Week 4 this Sunday at Tampa Bay.
Ahead of the Week 2 loss to the Atlanta Falcons at home, the star wide receiver appeared on the injury report with a hamstring issue and was ruled out entirely for the game soon after. Then, during the Monday Night Football broadcast on ESPN, Brown told sideline reporter Lisa Salters that he expected to miss a couple more weeks with the injury.
"Just got a little tight in practice yesterday," head coach Nick Sirianni said after Brown appeared on the injury report, noting that the team was trying to exercise caution. "We'll see how that goes."
They're exercising even more caution now, staying patient, and trying to get by without their top pass-catching threat in the meantime – on top of the likelihood of no DeVonta Smith this week either due to a concussion.
Hamstring injuries are common for NFL receivers, but they can be nagging and tricky to recover from, too.
To help give a better idea of what Brown might be dealing with, and what his return timetable could look like, Dr. Dinesh Dhanaraj, an orthopedic surgeon at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, offered his insight.
A note before getting started...
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and guest authors and do not reflect any official policy or position of any NFL team or a team's athletic physicians.
The hamstring consists of a large muscle group that runs down the back of the thigh, and in sports, plays a major role in an athlete's ability to shift direction.
"One of its main jobs is explosiveness, sprinting, changes in direction and acceleration," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "So it's particularly problematic for wide receivers who probably have the most common rate of hamstring injury in the NFL. It's their sport, you know? Running that route, accelerating, turning, that's why they're so at risk for hamstring injuries."
It's also a muscle group that's hardly ever not in use, Dr. Dhanaraj continued. The muscles are required to walk, "so it's hard to rest," he said.
Furthermore, hamstring injuries can take different forms. "Tightness" has been the word used to describe Brown's injury, but "tightness is a vague term," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "We call these injuries hamstring strains, pulled hamstrings, but there are usually basically three grades: Grade 1 is like a stretch of the [muscle fibers], Grade 2 is a partial tear, and Grade 3 is a full rupture."
Where in the muscle the injury occurs is important as well, especially as it concerns recovery time.
"If they occur in the actual muscle belly, like just the back of the thigh, that's one thing," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "If they occur at the tendon junction, near where the tendon inserts into the pelvis, that's a whole other story."
"Muscular injuries tend to heal faster," he added, which could amount to 3-6 weeks of taking time off versus the prospect of surgery if the issue is in the tendon.
It's pretty apparent, however, that Brown's injury isn't to the tendon, Dr. Dhanaraj said, otherwise the Eagles would have headed straight to surgery instead of letting him sit.
The route now is to have Brown rest, with treatment and the supervision of an NFL training staff that has all of the tools at their disposal, then gradually test his hamstring as it heals.
"They'll basically test his ability, and they'll let pain be his guide in terms of how quickly they accelerate [his rehab]," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "They're not going to tell him 'Hey, start off at a full sprint' right after that. It's going to be gradual. If he's walking without pain, that's good. If he can start jogging without pain, that's good. Can he give a 3/4-speed sprint without pain? It's just a matter of testing as you go on."
And while injuries, and the time it takes to come back from them, are never ideal, the early-season schedule looks like it will work in Brown's and the Eagles' favor toward getting him back on the field.
Brown has missed two weeks already between the Falcons and Saints games, and is probable to miss a third this week against Tampa. But an early bye week right after will bring Brown to four, which would put him in that aforementioned 3-6 week recovery window for a muscular injury in the ramp-up toward the Cleveland Browns matchup at home on Oct. 13.
By then, Brown could be back on the field at the NovaCare Complex and testing things out in anticipation of a return, but the Eagles' injury reports in the weeks to follow will be the outside guide for that.
"It just depends on that grade of injury," Dr. Dhanaraj said.
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