MOBILE, Ala. — The first thing one noticed about Carson Strong last week at the Senior Bowl was what he did not have. The brace on his right knee was gone.
It wasn’t the first time since undergoing surgery last February that he played without it. In Nevada’s regular-season finale at Colorado State — a game best remembered for Steve Addazio’s ejection, which preceded his firing days later — Strong shed the brace. But he struggled to move, and when pressured, could only lumber away when he tried to escape.
Two months later, at Senior Bowl practices, he moved with far more fluidity. He smoothly executed dropbacks from under center, something he did not do in Jay Norvell’s iteration of the “Air Raid” offense.
A scrambler, Strong is not. But he was mobile enough.
“I’m not Lamar Jackson by any means, but I can move a little bit,” he said. “I’m not a complete statue.”
Every question tossed at Strong about his knee, he’d been asked before. It’s one of the first topics that arises from teams that talked to him last week as he made his way through the Senior Bowl gauntlet.
“I’ve probably talked about my knee around 100 times. But it’s OK,” Strong said. “I was expecting that. Unfortunately, they’re going to ask about that. It’s no surprise.
“The whole story with my knee is: I’ve had two knee surgeries. I tell them, kind of [as a] joke, I’ve never jammed a finger, I’ve never sprained an ankle, but I’ve had two knee surgeries.”
Both procedures were necessitated by the osteochondritis dissecans from which he suffered in his left knee. The first surgery, in 2017, sidelined him for his senior season in high school. That procedure involved an insertion of pins into his knee cartilage to reattach it to the bone.
Last February, a more radical procedure was required.
“Instead of repairing my own cartilage, they took out that cartilage and put in new cartilage from a cadaver,” he said. “So, I got a tire-swap change on cartilage …
“… But the thing with that, though, is the bone has to accept it. Bone takes a long time to heal.”
The expected recovery time from that procedure is 12 months.
Strong played the Wolf Pack’s season opener barely six months later.
He passed the football well; last season he completed 70.0 parent of his passes and notched a 36-to-8 touchdown-to-interception ratio. He was also sacked a career-high 37 times, reflecting the lack of mobility that dogged him as he played through the recovery.
“I didn’t put too good a film on tape this year, because I couldn’t move very well because my leg was getting swollen and stiff; it’s hard to move when your leg is swollen — especially in the first half of the season, I couldn’t move very well,” Strong said. “But it did get better.”
Sitting out the year to recover — per the initial 12-momth rehabilitation timeline — was a consideration, Strong said.
“It was a conversation, but there was no way I was going to miss the season,” he said. “There was no way I was going to miss any games. We just put together the best way to come back.
“You just had to [tough] it out and roll with the punches.”
That he was able to emerge brace-free after gutting out a season says a lot about his resilience. Now, he feels, the best is yet to come..
“It’s only going to get better from here, just getting more strength in my leg, my quad and my hamstring is going to be able to support the knee better,” Strong said. “My graft, it has been accepted. If it was going to rip out, it would have already happened. So, it’s there.”
Strong knows more questions are coming.
But after a week without a brace, he feels like he has the answers NFL teams want.
