After Sunday night’s win over the Giants, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones rushed to the microphone to declare that receiver Dez Bryant would miss 4-6 weeks with a broken bone in his foot. Other actual doctors (who never treated or evaluated the patient) applied a longer timeframe to Bryant’s return.
Appearing on PFT Live, former NFL athletic trainer Mike Ryan said no one knows how long it will be.
According to Ian Rapoport of NFL Media, the Cowboys now expect that Dez will miss 10-12 weeks. The longer time frame, per Rapoport, arises from the fact that a bone graft was needed to repair the so-called “Jones fracture.” Even without a bone graft (which isn’t done in all cases but which isn’t an unusual development), doctors who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express and otherwise had been pegging Dez at a longer recovery window — including Falcons receiver Roddy White, who applied simple logic in reasoning that teammate Julio Jones had the same thing, and missed the whole year.
If the Cowboys truly expect a 10-12 week absence, they need to decide whether to carry Bryant on the active roster, or whether to place him on injured reserve with the designation to return, which would knock him out for a minimum of eight weeks. As Rapoport notes, coach Jason Garrett said Friday that the team wants to give Dez every opportunity to return early.
But that could be a problem. With Jones applying a far shorter window for return and Garrett essentially saying Dez can be back within two months, Bryant may push it harder than he should — which could lead to re-injury of an already delicate area of the foot.
So, basically, Dez didn’t hold out and he signed a long-term deal and he showed up for Week One . . . but that could be it for a while, especially if he tries too hard to get back on the field at the not-so-subtle urging of his team and breaks the bone again.