On Saturday, Carolina Panthers coach Matt Rhule announced that rookie quarterback Matt Corral’s 2022 season was likely over after he exited Friday night’s loss to the Patriots early.
Corral’s foot was stepped on, and coaches suspect that the third-round pick out of Ole Miss suffered what would be a season-ending Lisfranc injury.
You may have heard of a Lisfranc injury before. It’s what held out Jacksonville Jaguars running back Travis Etienne during his rookie season last fall, and it’s what limited third-overall pick Derek Stingley Jr. to just three games during his final campaign at LSU in 2021.
But what, exactly, is a Lisfranc injury?
Most football-related injuries are relatively self-explanatory. A broken finger or sprained ankle is an easy enough concept to grasp, and the alphabet soup that is the ACL, MCL, PCL and LCL can be understood basically as the ligaments that keep your knee from bending in an unholy fashion. Tearing one of them is no bueno and can keep you out of action for a lengthy period of time.
But Lisfranc injuries are less intuitive.
As defined by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons:
“Lisfranc (midfoot) injuries result if bones in the midfoot are broken or ligaments that support the midfoot are torn.”
Essentially, the five long bones that make up your foot — the metatarsals, if we feel like being fancy — are held together by what is called the Lisfranc joint complex, named after 19th-century French army surgeon Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin, one of the early observers of such injuries.
These joints keep the bones in the middle part of the foot in place, but they can be easily damaged, and Lisfranc injuries are common in athletes, especially football and soccer players, when another player steps on their foot. This is exactly what happened to Corral.
Considering the stress football players put on their feet, a Lisfranc injury is no joke and can have quite a lengthy recovery process that extends to six months or even a year, depending on the severity. If surgery is required, patients generally can’t bare weight on the injured foot for a six-to-eight week period following surgery.
This is why Corral’s outlook in 2022 isn’t very optimistic, and it could be quite some time until he’s allowed to practice at full speed once again.
But at least now, when you see Lisfranc injuries in the news, you can impress everyone around you by using the word “metatarsals.”
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