Internet Sleuthing: Rashan Gary's Injury Status

Submitted by Maison Bleue on October 17th, 2018 at 4:00 PM

I was perusing The Victors Club board over at 247 and saw some discussion on Tarik Black's injury. In the discussion thread umbig11 chimed in with this:

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Which of course is good news in regards to Black, but the additional news about Gary is very concerning. Another poster responded to him and this was umbig11's response back:

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Not good, Bob. There was an additional thread on the board about Gary being shut down for the year ala Bosa and umbig11 chimed in yet again with this:

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So at the very least, it seems Gary won't be back this week :( and is possibly considering shutting it down for the season... Why can't we has nice things?

Hopefully, I am not breaking MGoRules by posting these screenshots from a paywalled thread. I figured umbig11 posts inside info here regularly and he doesn't work for 247, so fair game?

goblue4321

October 17th, 2018 at 4:41 PM ^

well that's not good news, I wouldn't suspect an ac joint to keep out for year, could be something more serious going on that we don't know, labrum, rotator cuff, etc.....

bluepdx

October 17th, 2018 at 5:09 PM ^

I injured my ac joint, and it hurt like hell with no contact for weeks. Then it took months to heal to no pain, again, all with no impact on it. I can't imagine how long it would have taken with any routine impact, let alone 300 lb linemen smashing it.

DairyQueen

October 17th, 2018 at 9:14 PM ^

Not to mention, he's clearly been dealing with the shoulder injury for a while, possibly even into last season.

As a disclaimer, we are CLEARLY better off with him in the lineup than not, having said that, the D-Line looked pretty great against a talented, all-american offensive line in Wisconsin (even considering Don Brown clearly deployed some interesting blitzes and switched into zone coverage a few times).

evenyoubrutus

October 17th, 2018 at 4:44 PM ^

Well, the silver lining to this is that it won't give MSU or OSU any injury excuses. I mean, Gary hasn't played healthy all year and S&P still has us the #1 defense.

I Like Burgers

October 17th, 2018 at 4:44 PM ^

I do wonder if Rashan isn't just going to go the Bosa route and shut things down, rest and recover, and then get ready for the NFL combine.  Would still expect him to be around the team though instead of just bailing like Bosa did.

mGrowOld

October 17th, 2018 at 4:50 PM ^

Ding, ding, ding.

First thing I thought of yesterday when the news of Bosa hit was "dont get TOO excited fellow Michigan fans.....I'll bet anything Gary will be next".

Too much to lose to play and virtually nothing to gain re his current draft status.  And before anybody goes nuts on this I simply ask you to look at one Jake Butt's career for a moment and tell me if you were Rashaan's father if you wouldnt tell him the exact same thing.

Chiwolve

October 17th, 2018 at 5:06 PM ^

Not to be that guy, but Rashan's father is not very active in his life so I doubt he is telling him a god-damn thing.

Also, Bosa's situation is different than Gary's. Bosa is consensus top 3 pick and has had insane production at OSU. Gary's draft position has a lot more variance and thus could be improved by more demonstrated production. 

Finally, it's one thing to sit out a meaningless bowl game to preserve health (i.e. McCaffrey, Fournette, etc.) - it's another to sit out the remaining 2/3rds of your junior year. If that is a viable strategy, then he probably should have just sat out the whole year as his draft status is probably about the same (maybe even worse) than it was entering the year. 

Leaders And Best

October 17th, 2018 at 7:13 PM ^

Correct. Bosa had little to lose with his draft stock cemented for the most part conservatively in the top-10, likely top-5. Especially if it is a season-ending injury.

Rashan Gary is not in the same situation and could cost himself a lot of money by sitting out if he can play. I could see making a case for it if it were a season-ending injury, but we haven't received any signal yet this is the case. And it will be something that comes up in the interview process if you sit out with an injury that the NFL believed you could play through. Really hard to know without knowing more about the severity of the injury. My hope is they are giving him until after the bye week to heal and  reevaluate for the final stretch of games, and potentially, a postseason championship game. I have not, and do not expect him to play this week, but that is just a guess on seeing him not even dress the last two weeks which means he was pretty far from playing a week ago.

Kevin13

October 17th, 2018 at 9:29 PM ^

Very true. Gary really has not done anything extraordinary this year to improve his draft status and if he misses a good portion of this year it won’t really help either. He needs to get healthy and show dominance again to be a high draft choice 

Chiwolve

October 18th, 2018 at 10:15 AM ^

Umm.... Bosa has had 17.5 sacks in 29 career games... compared to Gary's 8 in 30 career games....and also more than Winovich's 16.5 in 33 games (excluding 2 games Chase played as a Sophomore).

I would say we are all very happy with the Chase / Rashan combination, but Bosa's production is on another level.

And BTW, PFF had him as their top rated returning player in all of college football (Gary didn't make the top 50). I say this not as a knock on Rashan, but just a further illustration that there situations were not / are not the same

https://www.profootballfocus.com/news/pff-college-50-top-ncaa-players-for-2018

ESNY

October 17th, 2018 at 5:13 PM ^

Wasn't Bosa's injury possibly a season ender or close to it?  It is not like he was coming back next week and now is skipping half the season.  If that was the case, why bother dealing with classes when he wasn't going to make it back to the field this year and he was going to leave school within two months to prep for the draft either way.  

reshp1

October 17th, 2018 at 5:48 PM ^

I dunno, the way he took the loss to Sparty last year on the Amazon special, I have a hard time believing he's going to sit out his chance for revenge if he's at all able to play.

Even from a draft stock standpoint, he probably has more to gain by playing, as long as he can still do so productively. His draft status isn't a slam dunk like Bosa where it's a no brainer to shut it down.

DelhiWolverine

October 17th, 2018 at 4:46 PM ^

#1 thing is Rashan doing what’s best for his long term health. If that means he’s out for the rest of the year, I know he will be greatly missed. That said, it gives his backups PT this year to develop and that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather have Paye getting plenty of in-game experience leading up to OSU. And I don’t see us facing another O line as good as UW unless/until we see them again in the BTC game. 

Firstbase

October 17th, 2018 at 4:54 PM ^

One wonders whether this is a new trend among those deemed NFL-worthy. If someone's not 100% (and actually, no one is throughout a season), who decides whether they play or not? If team doctors (and also coaches) say someone can return from being injured, but the player decides he's not ready or willing to play, what recourse does a program have regarding the player-team scholarship/contract? 

It's all a bit unnerving. This didn't happen in previous decades. I never liked the one-and-done scenario in college basketball, and now that phenomenon seems to be potentially happening through self-imposed injury exile. (I'm not necessarily pointing fingers at Gary.)

Sounds like a bigger mess is in the making here.

 

Stuck in Lansing

October 17th, 2018 at 5:10 PM ^

I mean, you could just solve this by paying them. Then you could withhold salary if you felt that way. Legally speaking, college athletes aren't getting a scholarship to perform a service. This is the reason they aren't taxable. (I didn't make that rule.) You would have a hard time withholding a scholarship on ground of a breach when no obligation existed in the first place.

grumbler

October 18th, 2018 at 6:14 AM ^

As the actual market for non-NFL football player shows, the college education, coaching, exposure, and facilities access make it by far the best deal going.  That's why players compete to join the best teams, and only accept the alternatives if they fail to get a college football opportunity.  That's how markets work.

FatGuyTouchdown

October 17th, 2018 at 7:46 PM ^

They very much are. But the value is significantly lessened when players aren't able to major in their field because it conflicts with football. Even more so when players have to miss class due to football responsibilities. If we want to treat them as just students, we should probably just stop putting them on TV, stop missing class for practice or travel, stop paying coaches millions of dollars and stop the arms race in facilities and support staffs. But until those things go away, it's disingenuous to pretend that a scholarship to play football is where we should limit the worth of the players, because many of them are worth significantly more than that on the open market.