Dr. Schulz explains weighs in on Titans QB’s injured throwing shoulder.
Link to Article: Explaining Will Levis’ injury: How Titans are handling QB’s hurt shoulder
Pitchers tear their elbows. Basketball players sprain their ankles. Boxers break their noses.
And quarterbacks, quarterbacks deal with shoulder injuries.
Just ask Tom Brady, who was listed as having a shoulder injury on more than 100 injury reports with New England. Or Drew Brees, whose career nearly ended because of a shoulder dislocation in 2005. Or ask Aaron Rodgers, who sprained his shoulder four starts into his tenure and had to learn to play through the pain.
Ask Jalen Hurts, who led Philadelphia to a Super Bowl two months after spraining his shoulder. Ask Kyler Murray or Trevor Lawrence or any number of young hotshot quarterbacks in recent years who’ve had their instrument bruised or torn or inflamed or separated or rendered immobile in some capacity.
Or, of course, ask Will Levis, the second-year Tennessee Titans quarterback tracking to sit out a second-straight game with an AC sprain in his right throwing shoulder, an injury timed perfectly to derail any hopes of progress in his first full season as a starter.
“I just…” Levis says, “I’m waiting on it to feel good.”
That’s the problem with shoulders. Of all the joints in the human body, the shoulder is one of the least cooperative when the goal is feeling good.
Dr. Brian Schulz, an orthopedic surgeon at the Cedars Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute and the team physician for the Los Angeles Angels and Anaheim Ducks, calls the shoulder one of the more complex joints. While knees and elbows tend to only bend the one direction, shoulders raise and bounce and roll and wobble in every way.
“It’s not a joint that you can brace, per se,” Schulz told The Tennessean. “There are some joints that you can put a knee brace on or an ankle brace so that while the ligaments in the capsule are healing, you can stabilize it. With the shoulder, there’s not really much you can do by ways of bracing it. So you just have to make the muscles around it strong again and get that pain-free or pain-tolerable motion and function back.”
This is the stage Levis is in. He’s limiting how much throwing he’s doing for fear of “wasting rest.” He says there have been times throughout his rehab process where he’s felt restricted in which arm slots he can throw from and how high he’s been able to lift his arm.
Schulz compares throwing with a sprained AC joint to agitating a bruise. The problem is there really isn’t a way to avoid poking the black-and-blue mark, here. For one, throwing a football involves raising your arm. And, for two, there are a lot of aspects to being a human being that involve range-of-motion in the shoulder.
“It’s been tough because it’s walking around and you’re dealing with the discomfort,” Levis said. “You don’t want to mess with it but all I want to do is just move it and feel it out. So I’m just trying to let it be and let it run its course.”
Levis is hardly the first quarterback to deal with this dilemma. Lawrence missed a game last season in the heat of a Jacksonville playoff hunt because of an AC joint sprain. Hurts missed two games toward the end of the 2022 season with his Eagles fighting for the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
Brady didn’t miss any time after injuring his shoulder back in 2003. In fact, he won 14 games in a row despite the injury, culminating in his second Super Bowl, then had surgery in the offseason. Brees threw for 4,418 yards the year after his injury and Rodgers threw for 313 yards and three touchdowns the week after his.
Playing through this isn’t impossible. Levis wants to make it clear it’s not even impossible for him. He doesn’t regret playing through the injury in the Titans’ loss to Indianapolis (even if he only threw for 95 yards that game) and wants to make it clear that he didn’t sit out last week because the pain was unbearable.
“I think any teammate that’s ever played with me knows I’m the type of guy to push through and try to play through everything,” Levis said. “But at the end of the day you’ve got to be smart and take care of what essentially is my career. Just make sure I’m good next time I’m out there.”
That’s where the mental reps come in. Speaking circularly, Levis says one of his goals this week has been making sure he takes every rep he doesn’t take, meaning it’s essential to view the practices where he’s limited, or even the games where he’s not playing, as growth opportunities rather than delays.
“Will stands right back there after every snap,” Titans offensive coordinator Nick Holz says. “I do think it’s kind of now that he’s been able to step away from it, he’s getting to see it slow down. ‘Okay, this is what I would do. This is how I would build from this. Okay, that safety rotation went that way, oh, that’s what I would do.’ There’s a lot of benefit to that. Hopefully it translates when he comes back that he can kind of play faster and have that cleaner processing mentally.”
Because, as Levis heals from his injury, that’s the quality that’s going to matter when it comes to determining whether he’s ready. It’s not about whether he can deal with the pain. It’s about whether he can manage the pain without it distracting him from everything else he needs to get done.
The pain is going to be there. Levis is going to keep poking at the bruise. He’ll be ready to get back on the field, though, once the bruise being poked stops being the kind of thing that can prevent him from making all of his throws.
