There may be no worse feeling in the world than powerlessness. Particularly powerlessness to stop something bad from happening. That’s where Pittsburgh Steelers outside linebacker T.J. Watt was after tearing his pectoral muscle in the first week of the 2022 season.
It left a big impression on the team’s season, ultimately going 9-8, including 1-6 in the seven games that Watt missed immediately following the injury. Even when he returned in the second half of the year, he wasn’t the same player. It was one of the worst feelings he’d ever had professionally, and it spurred him on to seek answers this offseason.
As he told Mark Kaboly of The Athletic recently during OTAs, the only answer that he got back is that there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done about it—at least not with the way that he plays. In terms of the work that he puts into his game and into his body during the offseason, nothing he could have done differently would have changed what happened.
“I have talked to so many different people, and there was absolutely nothing I could have done in the offseason or working out to stop what happened to my pec”, Kaboly quotes Watt as telling the outlet. “You have to continue to tell yourself that it was just a freak injury”.
While it was the first major injury of his NFL career, he is not wholly unfamiliar with having the game taken away from him for a time due to injury. He hardly even played his first couple of years in college, in part due to a knee injury.
Watt was coming off of a career year in 2021 after registering an NFL-record 22.5 sacks, winning the Defensive Player of the Year award. He was all set to follow it up with a stirring encore, and indeed he played very well in the 2022 season opener right up until he tore his pectoral muscle near the end of regulation.
When he returned for the final nine games of the season, he was clearly playing hurt. His only concern at that point was just getting back on the field in a way that did not risk reinjury. While he was in no danger of making the injury worse when he returned, it was still preventing him from being himself while continuing to heal. As a result, he had the worst season of his remarkable career—even though he still somehow made the Pro Bowl.
Even an unsatisfactory answer, however, is still an answer. Now he knows that he can’t train away the risk of a significant injury. Freak things will happen, and occasionally they will even happen to you, just because they happen, not because of anything that you did or did not do.
The only thing contributing to Watt’s injury that he could have controlled is the relentlessness with which he plays, perhaps. And if he didn’t play that way, then he wouldn’t be T.J. Watt. And if he were not T.J. Watt, what would be the point?
