Big Blue View
The options if Andrew Thomas isn’t ready are not great.
I love a good horror movie. Classics like “Alien,” “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs” that ratchet up the tension are right up my alley. That said, I got a little sick to my stomach when I saw this headline about New York Giants’ left tackle Andrew Thomas the other day in nj.com:
I’m not saying it would be as bad as Norman Bates showing up my bathroom. But the reality - that lisfranc injuries are serious, take a lot of time to heal, and come with no guarantee of returning to play, or returning at the same level of skill as before the injury - is enough to make any Giants fan cover their eyes in horror.
In case you haven’t yet read your March 2025 issue of Orthopedic Reviews, here are the results of a study of basketball players who suffered lisfranc injuries by Ali et al., although the NFL is mentioned as well:
Out of the 22 athletes included in the study, 73% (n=16) returned to play after a Lisfranc injury, while 27% retired from the sport. The average TTR for the athletes who resumed playing was 307 days (10.09 months). The average age of players who returned was 24.6 years, with the NBA having the highest average age of 29.5 years. The incidence of Lisfranc injuries varied across leagues, with the NFL having the highest incidence over a specific time span.
Thomas was injured in the Cincinnati game on Oct. 13, so the start of the 2025 NFL season is close to the average lisfranc recovery time. The Ali et al. study cites a 2016 study of NFL players by McHale et al. in The American Journal of Sports Medicine that concludes
More than 90% of NFL athletes who sustained Lisfranc injuries returned to play in the NFL at a median of 11.1 months from time of injury. Offensive and defensive players experienced a decrease in performance after return from injury that did not reach statistical significance compared with their respective control groups over a similar time period.
So the question of when Thomas will be ready to play is one thing. The scary thing is that second sentence. Only two of the 28 players studied did not return to play, and all 28 were from skill positions rather than the offensive line. There was however a measured decrease in performance, even though the sample size of 28 was too small for it to be statistically significant. The NFL lisfranc injuries studied were from 2000-2010, and maybe if we’re lucky progress in Lisfranc surgery and rehabilitation has occurred since then.
The more troubling thing is that Thomas has only played a total of 16 games in the last two seasons, in addition to missing games early in his Giants career. The Giants should be in better shape this year at quarterback with Russell Wilson to start the season, but Wilson no longer has the...
