Following the Buffalo Bills’ final game of the NFL season on Sunday, wide receiver Cole Beasley has revealed that he was playing with a broken fibula for the last three weeks. This came after some talk earlier this month of Beasley suffering a knee injury during a game against the New England Patriots, which led to him taking a week out before returning to the field for the playoffs.
“It was bad the first game I played but after that, you take a few meds and suck it up,” Beasley told reporters on Monday this week. “There was no way I was gonna miss a playoff game.”
In a new YouTube video, sports medicine and physical rehab expert Brian Sutterer, MD explains why a broken fibula on a football player is so unlikely, and how such an injury could have occurred in the first place.
“As crazy as this injury was, it’s not as dramatic and severe as the name sounds,” he says. “Isolated pure fibular fractures are actually pretty darn rare. For one, it’s considered a non-weight-bearing bone, and there’s not just many ligaments running to it where it’s going to be subjected to much load without an additional injury… Usually it’s the result of direct trauma.”
Sutterer speculates that it probably happened when the knee of a Patriots player slammed into the outside of Beasley’s leg, where the fibula sits. Even so, watching the footage, he says it doesn’t outwardly look like a serious enough impact to cause such a fracture—which just makes it even more of a fluke.
“Yes, it’s very impressive that he was able to play with a broken bone,” he continues. “It’s just a pain tolerance kind of question. Some of these bones can tend to heal pretty quick… You’ve got to give him credit for being able to tough it out, but it’s not as dramatic as it sounds.”
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