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New Orleans Saints fans were struck with bad news on Tuesday evening when it was reported that second-year defensive end Marcus Davenport suffered a serious foot injury during Sunday’s game against the San Francisco 49ers, and that the ailment was expected to require season-ending surgery.
On Wednesday, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport clarified that Davenport is dealing with a Lisfranc injury in his foot, which was diagnosed after he received a second opinion from Green Bay-based specialist Dr. Robert Anderson. Anderson performed the corrective surgery on Davenport’s turf toe injury after the 2018 season concluded, though it’s unclear whether he’ll be the doctor to treat Davenport after this Lisfranc issue.
So what is a Lisfranc injury? These issues strike the middle of the foot, hitting the long metatarsal bones that maintains the arch in the foot and allows people to push off and accelerate. It’s a painful condition that prevents those affected from putting weight on the injured foot, and is more common in football and rugby than, say, basketball or baseball.
The next question: how long will Davenport be out? According to a study completed before the 2018 NFL season, NFL athletes are typically sidelined for 10 months after surgery, give or take as much as three months. Every injury and every player is different, and their sample size was limited to 47 athletes (35 from football, and 12 from rugby). So some variance is to be expected.
It’s not realistic to expect the 6-foot-6, 265-pound Davenport to return as quickly as Baltimore Ravens rookie Marquise Brown, the 5-foot-9, 166-pound wide receiver who missed just seven months. A more comparable situation would be Washington Redskins defensive lineman Jonathan Allen (6-foot-3, 300 pounds), who went down with the same injury five weeks into his 2017 rookie season but returned in time for training camp — an absence of about eight months.
Davenport hasn’t had surgery yet, so there isn’t even a projected time table for his return in place. But precedent suggests he could miss a game or two to start the 2020 season, though things obviously could go better or worse depending on how his body responds to treatment.
Coincidentally, Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton spent most of the 2019 season trying to avoid surgery, but he went under the knife on Monday for an injury that’s comparable to what Davenport is experiencing. New York-based Dr. Martin O’Malley operated on Newton, and the Panthers don’t yet have any expectations of when Newton will be ready to play football again. His situation (and Davenport’s) illustrates just how common these kinds of injuries are in football, and how quickly things can escalate in such a physically-demanding game.
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