Typically, we hear that NFL players have had “minor surgery,” otherwise known as surgery on someone other than you. Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady did not have “minor surgery” on his knee.
Brady described the procedure as “pretty serious knee surgery” in his recent appearance on Hoodinkie radio (nothing that no one knows what it is has ever before gotten so much NFL publicity).
“I had a pretty serious knee surgery this offseason, which is the first surgery I’ve had in about 12 years,” Brady said, via Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times. “I was really interested to see how it was going to go, because last year it just took a lot. Every week I was kind of tending to my knee, and I thought I would love to see a season where I can focus on some other strength stuff that I want to do, some other technique stuff where I’m not just focused on protecting my knee all the time.”
Brady suffered a torn ACL in Week One of the 2008 season in the same knee that recently underwent “pretty serious surgery.”
“So It’s been pretty intense this offseason from that standpoint, because it’s been six and a half weeks that I’ve been dealing with the rehab process,” Brady said. “The season went pretty long, obviously into February. It’s just now that I’m starting to feel like the offseason is happening. And I’m going to blink my eyes and the offseason is going to be over.”
If you think you blinked your eyes and missed Brady’s name on the injury report with a knee problem in 2020, you didn’t. The Buccaneers never disclosed Brady as having any type of injury. Not once. Other than getting a handful of “not injury related” Wednesdays off, his name never appeared on the practice report.
The league rarely takes action against teams that fail to disclose injuries. Often, the player says enough about it (e.g., Brett Favre in 2009, talking about his 2008 partially torn biceps tendon) to force the league to take action. Whether Brady’s comments are enough to get his knee surgery on the league’s radar screen remains to be seen.