Bridgewater's Workouts

Over the past few months Minnesota Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater has posted pictures and video of his workouts. Throwing, running, moving, rehabbing. Things that some of the more morbid out there predicted that he'd never do again after suffering a brutal knee injury last August. I have mixed feelings about these pictures and video. Mostly I'm thrilled to see them but the media's knee-jerk reaction to them bothers me. It drives me to near madness every time that head coach Mike Zimmer or general manager Rick Spielman step near a microphone and are bombarded with questions about whether Bridgewater will be cleared for training camp. For one thing, neither head coach nor general manager clears injured players for practice. That's not their decision to make. It's a doctor's decision. For another thing, every injury is different and Bridgeater's injury is far from a routine knee injury. His was one of the worst knee injuries that a football player, or anyone, can have. A dislocation and torn ligaments. The injury to the knee was so severe that the quick response and handling by trainer Eric Sugarman might've been what saved the leg. All of this was and is new injury and rehab territory for Bridgewater, the doctors, Sugarman and the Vikings trainers, Zimmer, and Spielman. No one has any answers because no football player that I can recall has had to come back from this exact injury. There have been similar injuries, Marcus Lattimore's comes to mind, but every player, injury, rehab, and situation is different. Doctors often don't even know what they're facing until they have their patient cut open. Bridgewater and those involved in his return to the football field are writing a new script, their own script. No one can know how it ends at this point in the process. So why does the media keep asking the same questions? Supposedly it's their job but how many times do they have to ask a question to which no one knows the answer? Why do many in the media recruit doctors for a prognosis on a person that's not their patient? It strikes me as unprofessional, unethical, and just plain wrong for a doctor to comment on the recovery from an injury that they didn't treat. Some fans and some in the media seem to have a perverse fascination in Bridgewater never playing again, even walking again. As if that's a better story. Do those stories really get more clicks, more forwards, more retweets, more national attention? It's sad if they do. That's why I have mixed feelings about Bridgewater posting evidence of his progress. Each picture and video keeps the media talking about how unlikely his return is despite ample evidence that he might. The media just mucks everything up. NFL.com's Around the NFL writer Connor Orr is probably the media member that summed up Bridgewater's situation best.

Regardless of whether or not this is major rehabilitation news, it's another reminder to everyone watching his comeback to step back and think about how far he's come. The macabre depictions of Vikings practice the day Bridgewater got hurt were jarring. Surgery and rehab were brutal. The fact that we're even entertaining a return to football is fairly incredible.

Despite all of that belly-aching, I'm mostly thrilled to see evidence of Teddy Bridgewater's progress. Especially when it's done on his terms through his social media platforms rather than some creepy TMZ worm. It's wrong to assume that everything's just sailing along and he'll return to the field to lead the Vikings to multiple Super Bowl titles and join the ranks of the league's throwing greats. Nothing's guaranteed in football. That was proven true when Bridgewater went down after stepping away from center last August. Since that terrible day I've believed that he would play again simply because I tend to believe in things like that. Whether he returns to the field this year or next doesn't matter. All that does matter is that he returns to the field. He'd probably prefer the sooner the better but his return can't be rushed. The Vikings have Sam Bradford right now. At some point they'll have to pick one. It's far better to have to pick between two capable quarterbacks than to not have one at all. The Vikings know that all too well. Teddy Bridgewater's progressing in his return to the field and that's all that really matters right now. I look forward to that return but I don't look forward to he media's coverage of it.