Luke Braun: Fucking Hell, We Have To Learn About Knees Again

Luke Braun, who is not a doctor, goes into profanity-ridden explanation of the knee injury that Vikings rookie quarterback J.J. McCarthy apparently suffered in his preseason game against the Raiders.

Photo: Ric Tapia/Getty Images

Ed. Note: Minnesota Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy suffered from knee soreness following Saturday’s preseason game against the Las Vegas Raiders. After missing Monday’s practice, he underwent an MRI to verify the extent of the damage. The Vikings found that he suffered a meniscus tear and needs surgical intervention, putting his short-term future with the Vikings in some jeopardy.

Luke Braun gives us details on what that means and what kinds of decisions the Vikings and McCarthy will be expected to take.

If you’re a Vikings fan, which I’d assume most readers are, you probably hate knees. Knees have a primary function of destroying your favorite sports team, especially in Minnesota. From Daunte Culpepper to Teddy Bridgewater, a bad knee injury takes something exciting and turns it into a mess of anxiety and unanswerable questions.

Here we are again. The beacon of hope for the Vikings future is undone by a complicated string of cartilage in his leg. Shit.

J.J. McCarthy is set to undergo surgery for a torn meniscus suffered in his very first preseason game. The extent of this surgery will affect McCarthy’s recovery timeline and the long-term effects of the injury. It’s a question we won’t have the answer to until McCarthy goes under the knife, and even then, we’ll only know what the team decides to tell reporters. So, let’s learn about our options.

I’m not a doctor, I’m only an idiot that recently figured out how to read. But thankfully for idiots like me, actual doctors have written about the basics of the topic. I don’t want to have to read medical journals, you don’t want to have to read medical journals, but here we are. Now, this (primarily) sports newsletter has to dip into biology. Don’t blame me; blame God.

What The Absolute Fuck Is A Meniscus?

Seriously, what is this thing? Why is a tiny little tear enough to blow up my favorite team’s prospects for months and kill my fantasy team? Why are knees so delicate in the first place?

Without a meniscus, your femur and your tibia would grind against each other and wear each other down. The meniscus is a tough, rubbery piece of cartilage tissue that pads the two bones. When writing about this exact god damn shit a few years ago, I learned to think of it like a brake pad.

In some extreme cases, patients can experience an injury that leaves little to no tissue in their meniscus. If untreated, simply walking or adjusting your leg would be immensely painful. Your knee would swell up and become extra sensitive. Your meniscus is important.

The meniscus is not a load-bearing ligament like the more common knee injuries you’ll see in the NFL. Some players can play on a hurt meniscus like Adrian Peterson famously tried to in his final year as a Viking. Without the proper ligaments, you lose stability and strength, and athletics become impossible. With a meniscus injury, it becomes painful. 

Pain, however, turns to stiffness. Inflammation reduces flexibility, which we refer to as arthritis. In these extreme cases, that arthritis would be debilitating. An untreated meniscus tear will only get worse over time as the structural integrity of the cartilage continues to degrade. To fix it, they have to cut into that thing and dig around.

What The Fuck Happened Then?