Houston Texans

Are the Texans to blame for J.J. Watt's injury?

Published Nov. 15, 2016 2:06 p.m. ET

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Dieter Kurtenbach

J.J. Watt was on the path to the Hall of Fame. In his first six seasons in the NFL, he had posted 76 sacks, getting past the 70 sack threshold faster than anyone but Reggie White.

At age 27, Watt should have been at the peak of his prodigious abilities.

Now, we don’t know if he’ll ever be the same again. We don't honestly know if he'll ever play again.

Watt was placed on injured reserve Wednesday because of a back injury — the defensive lineman likely re-herniated the same disk that he had surgery on in July, and it could keep him out for the remainder of the season. (He's eligible to return in eight weeks.)

Watt might come back at 100 percent — the surgery he underwent, while invasive and precarious, is common and well understood, and no one expected after the first surgery that Watt wouldn’t eventually get back to full health. If he did indeed herniate the same disk again, as has been reported — there’s believed to be a 10-to-15 percent chance of that happening, even if rehab went perfectly — then there shouldn't be an expectation that a second slip would diminish Watt’s abilities any more than the first.

The issue would be mental. Will Watt be able to trust his body again? After playing with that herniated disk throughout the 2015 season, as well as a broken hand and a sports hernia, Watt admitted that he thought of retiring. The game was too taxing and he wasn’t sure if he had the physical ability to keep playing football.

But Watt pushed those concerns to the side and attacked rehab with his trademark grit and determination (which was well documented by his social media team).

Now he’s back on the shelf.

Was this just bad luck?

Was it a natural, inevitable byproduct of playing football?

Did Watt push himself too hard and come back too soon?

It’s probably a combination of all three of those impossible to quantify things. Hindsight being 20-20, surely all parties involved are wondering what they did wrong.

What is quantifiable, in so many ways, is the lost value of not having Watt on the field for the Texans.

Watt probably pushed too hard — that’s his natural reaction to “adversity.” But the Texans are not devoid of blame here, either.

They knew that Watt could and would play through pain — that he would do whatever necessary to get out on the field 53 days after his back surgery in July. They reportedly even forced him to take an extra week to recover because they felt uncomfortable with the speed of his rehab.

Again, hindsight is 20-20 and it's really easy to say that after the fact, but the Texans’ braintrust should have trusted that gut feeling. They should have pushed Watt to extend his recovery period — to take more time than he wanted. Watt has only one mode — as hard as he can go. He can't help himself — the Texans needed to take on that responsibility. 

This timeline also, of course, discounts the possibility that if Watt had skipped two, three or four weeks to start the season recovering, he still could have re-injured his back — but two, three or four games at the beginning of the season is a lot easier to handle than 12 games and the playoffs without Watt. The Texans should have looked at their division and their ludicrous roster of pass rushers and thought “we can wait.”

The Texans are going to win the AFC South with or without Watt. They probably can't win in the playoffs without him, though.

The Texans are going to want to remember this lesson because they're going to be tested again soon — though next time, the stakes will be higher.

Watt hasn’t been ruled out for the entire season. Do the Texans remember this moment and hold him out until next September, no matter how hard it might be, or do they fall into the same trap again?

We know the cycle now: Watt will rehab harder than any human alive, beat all doctors' expectations on recovery, and say that he’s ready to go for the playoffs, which are 100 days away. The Texans, just like they talked themselves into thinking everything would be fine after 53 days, could easily say “hey, that’s twice the time, what could go wrong?" and activate Watt.

Seven weeks might be enough time to heal a back, but it couldn’t have been enough to heal the toll of years of football on Watt’s body. His sports hernia injury, where abdominal muscles were literally torn from the bone, certainly couldn’t have helped matters — how many times have you heard that your core and your back are connected? imagine how messed up you'd be if both of those were seriously injured.

It’s easy to argue that Watt's whole body needed a reboot, and that reboot can only come from a lot of rest.

But J.J. Watt doesn’t rest, and the Texans aren’t in the business of not playing $100 million investments, so he was on the field. Whether it was an accident or the direct result of ignorance or negligence, the Texans deserve scrutiny. Without it, they might not learn the lesson and might not make the right decision 53 days from now.

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