About six months ago, Aidan Hutchinson shattered his leg. It was a brutal moment. Because you don’t want to see that happen to any human being. But also, Hutchinson is one of the bright young defensive stars in the game, and it was natural to wonder what the Detroit Lions’ season (especially the postseason) would have looked like with him still on the roster? Would the Lions have lost to the Washington Commanders in the divisional round? Would they have made the Super Bowl?
We’ll of course never know, but that’s how good Hutchinson has been in the NFL. That’s the kind of impact Hutchinson has had. He had 9½ sacks as a rookie in 2022, 11½ sacks in 2023, and last season he led the league in sacks with 6½ before his injury. Hutchinson is a force. A defensive storm. He’s a fairly unique talent.
When Hutchinson originally broke his leg, the team was devastated.
“It’s tough,” Lions defensive tackle DJ Reader said then. “Especially for someone who’s been there before. Not necessarily that injury, but you’ve been on your back with your eyes looking at the ceiling. You kind of get emotional, because you know what it takes. You don’t know what kind of fight you’re in for.
“But I know as team, (shoot), it’s been our whole lives. Like we can go out to practice and people get injured. In games, it happens. So, it’s one of those things you can click back in. I think there’s a time to be human during the game. So, we understand how to be human, then process it and get back to what we need to do.”
The human part … more on that in a moment.
Hutchinson since then has been steadily rehabbing. There was video from February of Hutchinson rehabilitating about four months after the injury:
Then came video this week of Hutchinson six months post-injury and it was, well, stunning:
I’ll leave the mechanics of injury rehab to the experts, thank you very much. I want to talk about the human component of this.
So many times we think of NFL players as drones. We still don’t see them as human beings as much as we should. We don’t realize (enough) just how staggeringly violent the sport is and how players not just survive, but prosper in this environment.
No, NFL players aren’t fighting in a war, and yes, they get paid well to do this. None of that negates what they do. None of that negates the extraordinary amount of work it must have taken Hutchinson to reach this point in his recovery.
A few things to focus on:
As you watch that video, keep in mind that Hutchinson is 6-foot-7 and 260-something pounds. Just that fact itself is remarkable. Not sure how fast he’s going but it looks darn fast. The fact someone that big can run like that just months after shattering his leg, again, remarkable human stuff.
The difference a few months in rehab makes is equally stunning. In the first video, you see a noticeable hitch. It’s gone in the second one. That leap in movement alone must have taken a gargantuan amount of effort. People who have had catastrophic injuries like this one likely have some idea of what Hutchinson went through to make that leap, but most of us who have never experienced that cannot.
Hutchinson is far from alone in coming back from a debilitating injury. We have seen this before. Alex Smith’s leg injury was extremely severe and the injury was complicated by an infection. Smith also documented his recovery the way Hutchinson is. There’s something equally striking about Hutchinson because we are getting peeks (not wholesale looks) at his comeback. We’re seeing leaps in Hutchinson’s recovery in real time.
More than anything, remember the humanity of what Hutchinson is doing. We are getting a nice window into what it takes to not just be an NFL player, but what it takes when one tries to return from something devastating.
We’re seeing a human being be human. We shouldn’t forget this is what being an NFL player is, too.