Texans’ Clowney won’t be ready for start of training camp
The Houston Texans have placed outside linebacker Jadeveon Clowney on the physically unable to perform list.
The move means the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft will not be ready for the start of training camp this weekend. Clowney played just four games as a rookie last season before having season-ending microfracture surgery in December.
Monday’s move isn’t a surprise. The Texans have said they weren’t sure if he would be ready for the start of training camp, but they still hope that he will be healthy in time for the season opener.
The Texans can keep Clowney on the PUP list for the first six weeks of the season if his knee doesn’t show improvement in the next month, or he can be activated at any time during training camp if it does look better.
Houston Texans team physician Walt Lowe recently told Forbes.com that Clowney "looks spectacular," and Texans coach Bill O’Brien was quoted by NFL.com’s Michael Silver as saying that he thought the former South Pointe Stallion and Rock Hill product would be ready to go for the team’s season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Lowe explained further in the Forbes article that Clowney’s quadriceps are in good shape thanks to blood flow restriction therapy. When injured knees instinctively fill with blood and swell, the quadriceps weakens, a natural - and scientists agree, understudied - phenomenon called arthrogenic muscle inhibition (AMI).
By restricting blood flow to Clowney’s quadriceps, Lowe’s hope is to reduce the likelihood of serious AMI, something that occur in both legs, not just the one surgically worked on. For a player built on speed and beating his blocker off the edge, strengthened quadriceps will be just as important to Clowney as getting his knee back to full health.
“The real goal in the end is to have him be who he was before he got hurt,” said Lowe in the Forbes story.
This story was originally published July 28, 2015 at 9:58 AM with the headline "Texans’ Clowney won’t be ready for start of training camp."