I read another al.com article that said Earle has a Jones fracture. Got curious and looked that up.
It’s a fracture between the base and shaft of the 5th metatarsal — the bone running from the ankle joint to the little toe. From what I was able to glean from the medical article, its severity — and therefore recovery time — varies greatly.
Sometimes it’s a stress fracture (which can actually be more worrisome), and sometimes it’s the result of a specific event. There’s been no word from UA on how Earle’s injury happened.
Regarding the injury in general (i.e., not Earle’s patient-specific circumstances — which we don’t know), there are several points of good news and bad news.
Some good news is that, with Saban’s stated 6-8 weeks recovery time, it would appear that Earle’s injury is in the less severe range of the spectrum. Bad news is that there’s not a ton of blood supply in that part of the body, so exactly where on the bone the fracture occurred matters a lot.
What I read also said that a couple of the big things in recovery are (1) rest immediately after the injury, and (2) not rushing the return to normal activity, as that enhances the risk of re-injury. If that happens, you start all over at the beginning of the recovery process, and likely miss the whole year.
Bad news there is that the required rest is likely to cause Earle to lose conditioning. So even when the bone is healed, he might need some additional time to get back into football shape. Good news is that he starts out as an elite athlete in world-class physical condition, has some of the best best training staff in the country to work with him on rehab, and has the Andrews group in Birmingham to supervise said rehab.
As frustrating as it is for us as fans, it must be even more frustrating for Earle. He hasn’t played a truly effective down of football since the last year’s New Mexico State game, roughly 9 months ago.