Commanders head coach Ron Rivera provided an update on Chase Young at the very end of his Monday press conference…and only said that Young is cleared for full contact and will get that starting Wednesday, but there’s still no word on if he’s going to be able to play Week 2.
“I told you a week ago there was fear he wouldn’t play until Week 3,” Grant Paulsen said on Monday’s show, “but he at least has a chance to if he’s going to be a full go in practice Wednesday.”
“A ramp up is the first major hurdle to coming back, but he hadn’t had contact in more than a month pretty much since he ended up with a stinger – and I put that in quotation marks because it has to be more than that,” Danny Rouhier responded. “Something to look forward to if he’s still limited or working on the side Wednesday – but if he’s a full go in team drills, it may be an indicator he’s moving towards playing again.”
Grant noticed “some pushback” this weekend that anyone who is frustrated with Chase Young is wrong because it’s a neck injury he should be allowed to recover from at his own pace – and while that’s correct and fair, there’s more to it than just this issue in his mind.
“The notion you can just boil down any frustration with Chase Young’s situation, and whether or not he’s going to play in this gotta have it year, as the most hyped player maybe in Commanders draft history, I don’t think it’s fair to say that if you’re annoyed by this you’re wrong,” Grant said. “I don’t understand that. He brings some of that on himself, with this press conferences he’s been doing where he says he’s good to go and expects to play and smiles and says he feels great…you start to have expectations then. He says all that, but he hasn’t been cleared, and he probably knew that – when you speak and answer questions about how you’re feeling and you say great, there’s some mixed signals and confusion. And, it’s frustrating when one of the faces of the franchise has played in three games in a year and a half. It doesn’t mean anyone wants him to play through a neck injury.”
“We’re not Bud Kilmer with a needle going into Lance Harbor’s knee here; that’s absurd, but that’s the implication, and that’s not the case at all,” Danny replied, invoking ‘Varsity Blues.’ “The frustration is the ‘any day now’ that lasts for months, with multiple players. We still haven’t heard anything else but stinger, but that doesn’t last for more than a day or two – it says something bigger is going on, but no one has said that. To me, it’s about the confusion, miscommunication, and uncertainty.”
Danny further said that if we knew Young was going to be out six or eight weeks when his injury happened, no one would say anything – but ‘when the expectation is set one way and it’s not met time after time, yes, there are questions.’
“No one is saying to stick a needle in the neck and get going, and risk your life to entertain me,” Danny said, “so the idea that’s the argument against what we’re talking about is frankly in bad faith, and feels wrong.”
“To me it’s irresponsible, and a straw man thing that we need to relax asking him to play with a neck injury,” Grant said. “I don’t know a single person who thinks that if his neck is hurt, he should be playing – and oh by the way, there’s been no acknowledgement that he has a neck injury from the team, the only thing we’ve heard is stinger. Which, again, is to my larger point that there’s more afoot to him than we know publicly, and that’s been the case for a long time, and after a while, I think that gets annoying for a lot of fans.”
