I'm definitely not part of a pitchfork crew, but I don't think it's a crazy that many of us were wary of potential injuries due to his mammoth size which I'm sure was a factor in his injury.
This is exactly where I'm at. I was hoping beyond hope that he'd become a road grader and mauler, but his yo-yo'ing weight concerned me. Now he's hurt, and I'll go further. A stress fracture in the knee can indeed be due to weight. It's not like anybody is out of their skulls if they link the two. His body simply wasn't ready to perform in one way or another. I think Occam's razor is siding with the weight guys vs. the bad luck guys. Sure, there are bad luck injuries. Does this really strike you as an irrational claim when almost everybody's biggest fear for the guy was realized in two days?
It wasn't a stress fracture.
Doesn't matter. You have an MD at The Athletic saying it was because of his injury history and weight/size. Pretty cut and dry here. Doesn't mean he was overweight. He's just too big for his joints.
The injury: What happened — and what’s ahead
In Week 1 against the
Panthers last season, Becton suffered a kneecap dislocation when a defender barreled into him. He was carted off the field, and it was later discovered he’d also suffered MCL and cartilage damage. Becton had arthroscopic knee surgery in September, and it was believed he’d be out four to eight weeks. Instead, he missed the entire season.
“The cartilage under your kneecap is technically the thickest in the body,” said Dr. Jesse Morse, a sports medicine physician based in Miami who has not treated Becton. “There’s a very good chance he chipped off some of that last year because of the sheer force of that kneecap popping off in such an extreme motion that it probably rubbed up against the femur, and when that happened, it took a chunk off that cartilage.”
Becton wasn’t ready to practice until Day 1 of training camp. Then on Aug. 5, Becton started wearing a brace in practice on his injured knee, aimed at addressing some discomfort he was feeling, Saleh said at the time.
Monday, Becton was spotted limping during individual drills at the start of practice after engaging with a teammate but stayed in practice anyway.
Saleh’s explanation: The team had a day off Sunday, and Becton had just played on the MetLife Stadium turf Saturday
in the scrimmage, his first time since last season, so “it was going to take a little while for his knee to get going.”
On the second play of Monday’s team drills, Becton’s right toe got caught in the turf as defensive lineman
John Franklin-Myers engaged with him, and his body went backward. He grabbed his right knee and favored it as he walked off the field and into the facility.
Initial tests showed no structural damage, Saleh said — so no ACL or MCL tears — but an MRI revealed the injury was more severe than initially observed.
Morse said that confusion is not surprising.
“A lot of times (the team will) do the highest-quality MRI that’s commercially available so you can see the nitty-gritty of every little piece of cartilage, meniscus, everything,” Morse said. “Sometimes they’ll even consider a CT scan, which is good for fractures, to determine the size of the bone, the shape of the bone. They’ll do 3D modeling to give you an idea of how it’s currently structured. An ultrasound can help, but it doesn’t penetrate bone well. That’s why, even if they threw on an ultrasound at practice, you probably wouldn’t have been able to see much, because it was underneath the kneecap.”
Saleh said as much: “With the MRIs, the deeper we got, the worse it got.”
Morse thinks Becton’s previous injury made him more susceptible to this injury.
“Anytime he gets locked in an engage position, that cartilage that’s missing is going to cause some pain underneath the kneecap,” Morse said. “So anytime you walk upstairs, down hills — anything changing in incline or decline usually causes pain there. When he was shuffling Monday, trying to get into his position, it looked like his kneecap maybe couldn’t keep up with the rest of the joint … so when that happened, he likely clipped a piece of the kneecap off.”
The very best-case scenario, with “ridiculous” luck, Morse said, would be Becton missing only six weeks. But the Jets, by all accounts, have already accepted the worst-case scenario: that Becton is out for the season. He’ll presumably be placed on injured reserve before the start of the season, officially ending it.
And Becton has a long road of recovery ahead, especially because of his size. He’s listed at 6-foot-7 and 363 pounds.
“The problem is, with a man of that size, there’s so much stress on that knee,” Morse said. “Every additional pound on the abdomen is 4 pounds on the knee. A normal-(sized) guy, it’s not a big deal. But someone who is 360, 370, that’s a massive load. Whenever you squat, the pressure in the joint increases 700 percent. So you’re adding a lot of forces here. …
“The way they’re describing it and the history of his knee injury and the size of the guy, put everything together, I’d be really surprised if he played this year.”