Pride of Detroit
Detroit Lions edge rusher Aidan Hutchinson has been on quite a journey over the last 336 days. After a remarkable start to the 2024 season, he was the clear early favorite to win Defensive Player of the Year honors. With 45 pressures (per PFF) and 7.5 sacks through four-and-a-half games, Hutchinson looked unstoppable. Then, on a sunny October afternoon in Dallas, while adding another sack to his monster stat sheet, Hutchinson was stopped—and in brutal fashion.
Lying on the field turf at AT&T Stadium, Hutchinson knew his season was over. From the moment it happened, he knew he had broken his leg (both his tibia and fibula), and he saw an opportunity lost, both for himself and his team.
“It was just a devastating thing,” Hutchinson reminisced. “I kinda knew it right away, and it was a lot of pain, but it was more the death of the season that hurt me the most.”
Hutchinson would spend the following days in a Dallas hospital recovering from emergency surgery, staring at the walls and a six-month recovery timeline ahead of him.
“I’ve never stayed in the hospital in my life,” Hutchinson said in May, during his first press conference since his injury. “So, staying in the hospital for a couple of days in Dallas, it was one of the most miserable experiences I’ve probably had in my life.”
As Hutchinson waded through the difficult waters of a long recovery period, processing difficult feelings of powerlessness and depression, his body slowly began to heal, and his perspective began to change.
Since his time at the University of Michigan, Hutchinson has visited local children’s hospitals—particularly Mott’s Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor—and spent time with children dealing with pediatric cancer. When he arrived in the NFL, Hutchinson and his family started a charity, the House of Hutch charity, dedicated to continuing his legacy of giving back.
Now, while rehabilitating from his injury, he began to reflect on the “Hutch Heroes” children, and he found motivation in their strength.
“I was like, ‘Dude, these kids who are in there for 30 days at a time, getting their treatments, and the parents that are in there with them,’” Hutchinson said. “I feel like that perspective; it makes me just understand more. And I didn’t really before. I just got a little taste of it. So you talk about the silver linings of the injury, and that’s kind of one of them.”
As Hutchinson continued through his rehabilitation process, an unexpected thing happened. The Hutch Heroes children found a unique way to give back to him. Several of the children began creating motivational videos, hoping to encourage the Lions’ superstar to continue pushing through his rehabilitation.
Hutchinson shared this uplifting story with ESPN’s Adam Schefter in a wonderful “Sunday Spotlight” segment leading into the 2025 season:
Hutchinson was cleared for full physical activity in May and spent the majority of his post-recovery time in his offseason, working on his craft. In training camp, it showed. Hutchinson was...
