Jordyn Tyson’s latest injury forces the New Orleans Saints to confront the risk they accepted with the No. 8 pick
New Orleans Saints WR Jordyn Tyson is already dealing with an injury. Should the organization have some buyer’s remorse early on?
Jordyn Tyson’s injury history followed him from college at Arizona State to the NFL, and the New Orleans Saints are now dealing with the consequences.
The talented wide receiver, selected in the top 10 of the 2026 NFL Draft, is already on the shelf with yet another hamstring issue before he has even seen preseason action. For those who tracked Tyson’s draft profile closely, this development is unfortunate but far from shocking.
Just 18 hours before the news broke, Saints beat writer Nick Underhill offered glowing praise of Tyson’s training camp performance. As Underhill posted on X, it would be hard to overstate how good Tyson was in camp.
The key word there is “was,” because the dynamic pass catcher is now expected to miss roughly two months of action.
The injury timeline is staggering
Tyson’s college health record reads like a medical encyclopedia. In 2022 as a true freshman at Colorado, he suffered a multi-ligament left knee tear (ACL, MCL, PCL) that ended his season and led to a redshirt and subsequent transfer to Arizona State. After a healthy 2023 campaign, Tyson fractured his collarbone at the end of the 2024 season, missing the final 2 games, including Arizona State’s College Football Playoff loss to Texas.
The 2025 season brought multiple hamstring issues on both the right and left sides, reported as grade 2 sprains, plus a sprained ankle. Those injuries limited Tyson to 9 games. He was productive in those 9 games, but 3 serious lower-body injuries in a single season raised every red flag imaginable. Now in 2026 with the Saints, another hamstring issue has surfaced.
That makes three documented hamstring injuries and a sprained ankle in roughly the last 12 to 14 months.
The medical clearance that didn’t tell the whole story
During the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, the reporting indicated Tyson received a clean bill of health. He wasn’t red-flagged for anything medically, which played a significant role in his top-10 selection. Medical red-flag players do not go in the top 10 (usually), and teams were clearly comfortable with the long-term forecast.
But there was always a disconnect between the medical clearance and the availability concern. A scouting source in the NFL pushed back on the worry at the time, pointing to the clean medical results.
The counter was simple: Tyson still missed 18 games in college. Projecting that he might avoid arthritis a decade from now doesn’t change the fact that he wasn’t available enough during his college career.
There was never any question about Tyson’s talent. He is an incredibly explosive player with great downfield acceleration and polished route-running ability. At his peak, he could be a better version of Chris Olave.
But the conversation always steers back to one reality: players who are injured in college usually don’t stop being injured in the NFL. That pattern tends to follow them.
The ‘unlucky’ argument has a shelf life
Throughout the draft process, the cope line on Tyson was that every single one of his injuries came from getting hit or landed on in awkward ways. Bad luck, nothing more.
And while that can be true in isolated cases, if you are consistently unlucky, at some point you are no longer unlucky. You are a player who cannot stay on the field.
The leg injuries paint a connected picture. The torn ACL and multi-ligament knee damage in 2022 may have been a freak occurrence, but what followed tells a different story. Hamstrings, ankles, the opposite leg, both sides affected. When one part of the body is out of whack or has to overcompensate for another, the cascade begins.
The sprained ankle in the spring of 2025 led to more hamstring trouble, and now a third documented hamstring injury has arrived before Tyson’s NFL career has truly started.
There is more than one kind of unavailable player. There is the athlete with chronic structural issues, and then there is the player who might just have a Lamborghini engine in a Honda Civic body.
Tyson is an extraordinarily explosive athlete, and sometimes the build of a player’s body simply doesn’t hold up under that kind of force. Whatever the root cause, the result is the same.
What comes next for Tyson and the Saints
New Orleans cannot act surprised that a player with this extensive an injury history is dealing with injuries in his first NFL offseason. Even the best prospects who seem to stall those injury concerns eventually face the same conversation.
Look at Landon Dickerson, who came out of Alabama with similar durability questions and now faces the possibility of an early retirement because his body is beaten down.
It is too early to abandon ship on Tyson entirely. The talent is real, and two months is not a career-ending timeline. The Saints and their fans will be watching closely when Tyson returns, hoping the pattern finally breaks.
