The rumor broke at the Senior bowl last night, that Notre Dame linebacker Jaylon Smith would be ready to play at the start of the 2016 season. Smith suffered a major knee injury early in his final game with the Fighting Irish in the Fiesta bowl.
He reportedly tore multiple ligaments in his knee, including his ACL and was presumed to going to miss the entire 2016 season whether it was in college or the pros. This knee injury wasn’t as bad as Willie McGahee’s injury in his final game for Miami or Marcus Lattimore’s was for South Carolina. However, it was worse than Todd Gurley’s was for Georgia in 2014.
How seriously should we take this report? I’m dubious. Gurley tore his ACL in mid-november 2014 and wasn’t ready for the start of the 2015 season. There’s only two possible ways that Smith plays to start 2016: 1-his knee injury wasn’t nearly as bad as has been reported or 2-he’s getting some sort of treatment that the NFL would like to investigate.
Smith had a severe ACL/PCL tear less than a month ago. No matter how clean the tear was, how great his surgeon was and how amazing he’s able to rehab, his knee just won’t be able to take the strain of playing in the NFL that soon.
It is possible that he’s put on the PUP list so that he could play halfway or so through the season. That would still be unlikely but plausible.
So what’s going on here? The most plausible explanation is that someone in the chain of this story: Matt Miller, whomever he talked to, and Jaylon Smith’s “camp”(his agent, family, etc) want to preserve his draft stock as much as they possibly can. And after Todd Gurley’s fantastic season when he got healthy, it is plausible that a team talks themselves into drafting Smith high.