Wow. Just saw an incredible deep dive on the Caleb Banks injury situation(s), the severity, the treatment, and whether or not we should be worried at all.
Happened to catch this from Luke Braun, from the Locked on Vikings podcast; Braun is really good, for the record. He does his homework, more than pretty much anyone else I've seen on the Locked On network I have to say.
I can try to summarize (but I could butcher some of it) to save some of you some time if you don't want to take the 20+ minutes to listen to the conversation he had with a Pediatrist on the injury specifics. I'll put it in some kind of timeline, best I can from memory;
- Banks gets a Jones fracture on his 5th metatarsal on his left foot, very early 2025 I believe. He elects to not have surgery, let it heal (the opinion of the doctor on the pod was that he WOULD have done the surgery).
- The likelihood of re-injury for a Jones fracture if you let it heal naturally can be as high as 25%; with surgery, that reduces to as little as 4-10%
- Banks tries to play near the beginning of the 2025 season LIKELY a little too early and re-injures the Jones fracture. He then has surgery to repair.
- Heals well, he crushes most of the pre-draft stuff. During the combine (or just before?), he feels a pop in that same foot. Continues the workouts/combine, crushes the workouts still, but feels more discomfort and has it checked out.
- The initial pop was likely a small stress fracture (a bone bruise basically), in the 4th metatarsal (completely unrelated to the Jones fracture in the 5th metatarsal), that could have been fixed without surgery with 4-6 weeks in a boot; but because he continued the workouts, he made it slightly worse. They had it fixed with surgery.
Long story short, my take on this is that I have little to no concern over Banks and either of these injuries impacting him moving forward. Clearly the Vikings feel the same way.
It sounds like a number of other teams had cleared Banks 100% as the Vikings essentially did, hence them taking Banks as high as #18.
Here's the pod; the first segment is just some guy who covers the Univ of Florida, I didn't really take much from what he had to say. The 2nd two segments with the Pediatrist I thought were absolutely fascinating.
