The Pittsburgh Steelers liked Troy Fautanu so much that they passed on Zach Frazier in the first round of the draft, and they love him. They felt so strongly about Fautanu that they even started him the second week of the season despite missing a great deal of time due to injury. But Ben Roethlisberger wonders if they didn’t give him enough time to come back before getting him back onto the field.
He brought it up on his Footbahlin podcast while discussing Alex Highsmith’s groin injury aggravation. Roethlisberger praised Nick Herbig and talked about how much of a boon it was to have him. Coming off a two-sack game, the Steelers can trust Herbig to fill in. I’m not sure the Steelers felt the same about their alternatives to Troy Fautanu. But now they have no alternatives.
“That’s nice because then you could tell Alex, ‘Hey, make sure you’re ready’. You don’t have to rush him back”, Roethlisberger said, talking about Herbig. “I think maybe that’s what they tried to do with our rookie lineman [Troy Fautanu]. Now he’s gonna be out for a while. I think they rushed [him]. I mean, I’m not a medical person, but when you rush someone…”.
Fautanu suffered a sprained MCL in the first quarter of the first preseason game. He did not practice for the remainder of the preseason, finally ramping up leading into the regular season. Though the Steelers gave him a helmet for the season opener, he did not play.
They plugged Fautanu into the starting lineup a week later, and he played the whole game. It was only during the following week of practice that he suffered a setback. The rookie failed to finish Friday’s practice, missing Sunday’s game. Yesterday, Ian Rapoport reported that he is set for surgery to repair ligament damage and “essentially” a dislocated kneecap.
As of this writing, we do not know if Troy Fautanu injured the same knee or the opposite knee. However, we do know that one injury could lead to another while overcompensating for the original injury. Until we know which knee he injured, though, it’s hard to say very much.
Ben Roethlisberger may well be speaking out of turn, or at least out of ignorance—and I suppose he is. He acknowledges he is not a “medical person” and doesn’t seem to know anything that we don’t know. Perhaps he got his information from our article, for all we know.
But one thing we know is that the Steelers aren’t going to say they rushed Fautanu back, leading to his subsequent injury. Again, we don’t know if this is an aggravation of his previous injury or something new entirely. But it’s not unreasonable to conjecture that this could fall under that category.
While Troy Fautanu played an entire quarter of football after suffering his original injury, it’s entirely possible that he didn’t take enough time to heal properly in a way that would prevent an aggravation or prevent him from overcompensating and leading to a new injury. It’s entirely possible, too, that one had nothing to do with the other, and that it’s merely bad luck.
