You don't typically expect, in a story titled "DE Taylor will have second surgery" predicting medical procedure next week, to read:
Taylor did not practice but still hopes to play Sunday against the Detroit Lions. He is listed as questionable on the injury report.
At least that's the word from Dr. Taylor:
"There has been talk about it, but to be honest, I don't even know what the gameplan is right now," Taylor said. "I'm going to the hospital now to find out what we're going to do. The only thing I'm really focusing on right now is hopefully playing the game on Sunday and try to help this team beat the Lions. The rest of it doesn't really matter right now. I've been hurt for a month and it hasn't changed. There's been a slight change and that's part of the reason why we're doing all this talking. I really don't know any details."
Coach Zorn said the problem was something like, uh, playing football isn't conducive to healing stabby-like wounds.
“He’s trying to play football on it, but that may not be allowing it to heal fast enough,” Zorn said.
Who'd have thought? To get an idea of how that plays out on the field, apparently Taylor has bloody sock syndrome and is bleeding out all over the football field week by week:
"Yeah, that was hot, did you see his sock?" Casey Rabach asked me. "It was all red. Kind of like Curt Schilling, but amplified. It was cool."
"We had quite a bit of blood come out," Taylor said. "It's still bleeding. It's been a month and it's still bleeding, but there's nothing I can do about it."
The "cool" oozing red goo is simply necessary and we're full of it, so Jason Taylor is absolutely right. You can't take any magic pill to cure "Blood." But one thing he can do about it would be... rest a bit, don't expose a leaky valve to the wear and tear necessarily resultant in violent sports. That would be the easy way out, and the question to readers: Does Jason Taylor need to walk this one off for a week or two or should he instead force it and play, with the added potential of this thing dragging on for, per him, a month now and leading to new surgery next week? I love his attitude about it, it is obvious mutant/hybrid Jason Taylor wants to play something fierce, so I hate even suggesting that maybe the medical staff needs to get in his face about healing up.
But we need him. Our pass rush is currently about as bad as anyone in the league besides Kansas City. Football Outsiders pegs us with a 4.8% adjusted sack rate. That puts us well below the 6.6% league average and higher than just Jacksonville, Cincy, and the aforementioned Chiefs. As skinsider pointed out, Taylor draws double teams that free up Andre Carter to go do harm and pain to the opposing quarterback. We don't have enough starter-quality defensive ends. If Taylor isn't on the field, Carter gets the double team and Demetric Evans or whomever on the far side isn't capable of defeating a single blocker with any sort of consistency. Chris Wilson, Rob Jackson, Demetric Evans and Erasmus James have combined for one sack. Someone please step up.
I won't fence sit, I want him to play. While a part of me almost thinks -- and this is crazy considering what happened two weeks ago -- if ever there was a game to miss, it's tomorrow, I appreciate too much the attitude exhibited by a player's willingness to fight through the pain. That's the kind of thing that makes me love football, and I'm certain that it impresses teammates. Leaving human gore on the field is leadership, man. Get out there and hurt them Jason.
I may not feel the same way three weeks down the road if/when we're still talking about this damn calf injury.