Did the Raiders get one of the steals of the draft in Jermod McCoy?
If McCoy can stay healthy, they probably did, but there are still a lot of questions around his knee, and no way to know how the knee is going to respond to the strain of an NFL season.
Either way, the Raiders took a calculated risk on McCoy in the fourth round and according to the California Post’s Vinny Bonsignore, there were other teams ready to do the same.
In a guest host appearance this week on the Raiders’ flagship radio station, Bonsignore said other teams were prepared to draft McCoy in the fourth round.
“I’ve talked to a couple of general managers around the league who shared what their intel was on him, and by the way, he was not lasting very much longer in the fourth round. People were ready to pounce,” Bonsignore said on Raider Nation Radio’s JT the Brick.
“They took the red flag off of him by that point in the draft across the league. So the Raiders did a good job of beating everybody to the punch and the way it’s been explained to me is it’s not a ‘right now’ issue. It’s a potentially long-range issue, the longevity of it. And Todd Gurley was a name that was brought up. He had suffered that devastating knee injury at Georgia, but he was recovered from it, was fantastic for a period of time in the NFL.”
“But then the longevity issue came into play [for Gurley]. People are looking for all these signs about the knee. Is it good? Is he good to go? It’s not that. It’s the longevity issue.”
There has been some encouraging news on McCoy’s knee in recent week
Earlier this month, one of the world’s most respected orthopedic doctors, Dr. Lanny Johnson, talked about McCoy’s injury on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“It depends on the size of the injury and the diameter of the plug,” Dr. Johnson told Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter.
“A one-centimeter plug is approximately a half an inch. Any of those that are in the small areas or say a half an inch or less have an excellent prognosis and the literature would… I don’t have any knowledge of any individual player, but the literature would say that that patient has a very good prognosis for let’s say 10 to 15 years, providing there’s no other arthritis in the knee or providing in his case that ACL is stable, providing that he rehabilitates well,” Johnson continued.
“But just on the basis of that lesion with a, and I don’t know whether he had a plug taken from his own bone put there or one taken from a cadaver bone. The ones from your own bone usually have a little better prognosis than one taken from a cadaver bone. But once taken from a cadaver bone are very successful.”
All 32 teams were provided with McCoy’s medical information prior to the draft, and despite more than half of the teams polled by ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler taking McCoy off their draft board, it is believed that McCoy’s knee plug was smaller than the “half-an-inch” referenced by Dr. Johnson.
The Raiders, nor anyone else, are going to discuss McCoy’s medical information, but there is reason to believe his “plug” was within the limits of what Dr. Johnson would consider optimistic.
Shortly after the draft, former Raiders’ offensive lineman Marshall Newhouse discussed McCoy’s knee, and said at the time that the odds were leaning toward McCoy not needing another procedure on his knee.
Newhouse clarified that he wasn’t speaking as a medical professional, but it’s fair to assume some of the rumors making rounds in the last few weeks have come from sources familiar with McCoy’s knee.
“This is that balance of risk and reward. I’ve heard that he’s healed from the ACL. [McCoy] could play this year,” Newhouse said on the Just Win podcast.
“The question is if he’s going to need another additional procedure that the rehab is 12 to 14 months and then there’s like a 20 percent chance, we won’t turn into the doctors here on that procedure… not working out. And so that’s a very big risk but one that you take with the 101st pick. So it’s interesting. Time absolutely will tell on this one.”
x: @raidersbeat