Maxx Crosby Offers Strong Response to the Doubters on His Knee Prognosis

The subject of Maxx Crosby’s health has become an increasingly hot topic in the last week, and there are some doubts about how the Raiders’ All-Pro edge rusher is going to respond following what was described by his doctor as a “significant” meniscus repair in January.

Crosby hasn’t talked a lot about his knee, but he shared a message with former Raiders’ defensive tackle Gerald McCoy this week that should come as an encouragement to everyone with a rooting interest in Crosby and the Raiders.

“I told Maxx, I said ‘You know what, I’m going on TV and I’m going to have to talk about you. Is there a message you want me to get across or do you want me to just tell the truth? I said I could tell my truth which is I know who Maxx Crosby is as a human. I know who he is as a player,” McCoy said on NFL Network’s Good Morning Football on Friday.

“You know what Maxx said to me?” McCoy continued. He said, ‘The truth is by training camp I’m going to be 200 percent ready, and this world will get the best version of 98 they’ve ever seen.'”

“It’s go time. That is not from me. That is directly from Maxx Crosby. All you all that’s doing all the talking, the Ravens, everybody that has something to say, you all just woke up a sleeping giant. Dogs when you bite ’em, they tend to bite back and that’s what Maxx is going to do. I can’t wait.”

Good Morning Football on X (formerly Twitter): “”By training camp I’ll be 200% ready and this world will get the best version of 98 they’ve ever seen” 👀- @CrosbyMaxx via @Geraldini93 pic.twitter.com/nLaYAF3O8W / X”

“By training camp I’ll be 200% ready and this world will get the best version of 98 they’ve ever seen” 👀- @CrosbyMaxx via @Geraldini93 pic.twitter.com/nLaYAF3O8W

As the Ravens have leaked and others have said on record, the issue with Crosby’s knee isn’t necessarily the short-term prognosis. The concern seems to be the matter of how long his knee is going to hold up in the long term.

According to NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, the data isn’t in Crosby’s favor as roughly half of surgeries involving a full meniscus repair don’t hold up longer than a year.

“I’m not a doctor, but in very simple terms, when you have a meniscus trim, that’s just cutting out the injured piece of the meniscus. Think of it like a hangnail. It’s bugging you. You get some clippers and you clip it off,” Pelissero said on the Rich Eisen Show.

“Meniscus repair would be like the really deep hangnail where it’s starting to bleed, and you know the skin’s going to fall off and you wrap it up with a Band-Aid and you try to keep it tight,” Pelissero continued.

“I talked to one doctor who’s very heavy into the injury data who said meniscus repairs have a 50 percent failure rate after one year, 80 percent failure rate after four years based upon their data. And again, that doesn’t mean the knee falls apart. It’s not like a failed ACL reconstruction, but basically it means you’re going to have less healthy cartilage in your knee. Your body cannot generate new healthy cartilage.”

The hope would be that having one the world’s premier surgeons working on his knee, along with his relentless approach to rehab, Crosby will be able to defy the odds and come back just as he framed it… 200 percent and the best version of himself the world has ever seen.

x: @raidersbeat

NFL Insider Tom Pelissero: Raiders Still Have Plenty of Suitors for Maxx Crosby | Rich Eisen Show

NFL Insider Tom Pelissero and Rich Eisen break down how the Ravens’ and Raiders’ deal for Maxx Crosby went south and the chances Las Vegas still trades the All-Pro DE before next season. Tune in to the Emmy-nominated Rich Eisen Show live weekdays from Noon to 3PM ET on Disney+, ESPN+, ESPN Radio, and streaming on SiriusXM channel 80.