Exactly. My understanding is that most Achilles tears aren’t the result of contact; they typically happen on a stumble or a pivot, but sometimes it doesn’t even take that to suffer the injury.
Running back Tariq Cohen tore his Achilles last year, during a livestream on his Instagram account, while he was doing an agility drill – he had been released by the Bears, and was trying to interest teams in signing him through the livestream. There’s no contact at all; it’s not even clear if he took a wrong/awkward step – he’s just pivoting a bit. Link to the video, spoilered just in case someone doesn’t want to see it:
A good friend of mine suffered a complete Achilles tear about five years ago, while he was out walking his dog. Again, not even necessarily an awkward step or anything – it simply tore while he was taking a step.
I’ve been watching football long enough to learn that one thing you should dread almost above anything else is the phrase, “non-contact injury”. They tend to be the most devastating injuries a player can suffer, especially a QB. Which seems counterintuitive; you’d think that getting slammed to the ground or wrestled or sandwiched between a couple of guys would be worse. But for some reason, almost every time I hear that phrase, it’s something extremely damaging and gruesome.
Anyone remember when Teddy Bridgewater suffered that freak injury in practice that almost lost him his leg and almost killed him? That sidelined his career for years, nearly ending it? Non-contact injury.
Contact injuries can of course be just as bad, of course. But often those are sprains or fractures which players can heal from quickly and/or completely. Non-contact injuries usually result in a lost season or even career. I guess one way to look at it is, it’s normal for someone to be injured if you’re hit violently. It’s not normal for a person to be injured just stepping the wrong way. If you get hurt doing something that seems innocuous, then something extremely bizarre happened, and it’s not good when bizarre things happen to the human body.
Another scary term is “soft tissue damage” for similar reasons.
I was watching the game with a group of teachers from Wisconsin, all rabid Packer fans. As one of them put it, while waiting for news from the locker room and watching Zach Wilson shine: “I hope Ay-ay-ron is all right. But I LOVE the narrative that the Jets are able to win without a highly-paid prima donna at the helm.”
Seems the most business approach for Rodgers would be to refuse to retire and stay on the Jets’ roster as long as he can, but to suck in a way that he cannot be given the starting job - maybe play up the Achilles issue as much as he can. That way he would force the Jets to cut him or keep him for both years and pay him the full $75 million while never taking a snap for the Jets.
Rodgers should be the biggest Zach Wilson cheerleader that there is.
If A-Rod retires, he gets no money, but if he stays on the roster like a tick, it’s $75 million.
At my old job, we sometimes gathered on the weekend for a game of touch football. One time, one guy tore his Achilles merely from taking a mild 2-point stance at the line of scrimmage before the snap. We all heard it give out. He ultimately had to get surgery. I had never seen (nor heard) anything like it.