Titans clear the air on injury confusion and concern for CB L’Jarius Sneed, giving first real reason for optimism in 2025
The best news on Sneed yet
The Tennessee Titans enter training camp without a pair of starters, CB L’Jarius Sneed and C Lloyd Cushenberry. They’ll begin the ramp-up to the season on the Physically Unable to Perform list (PUP), as I reported yesterday and was confirmed by GM Mike Borgonzi and President of Football Operations Chad Brinker at their Tuesday press conference.
Cushenberry’s situation is neither shocking nor frustrating for most fans, as this was expected on his road to Achilles recovery. Sneed, however, has been dealing with a pair of far more vague injuries since becoming a Titan: his right knee issue, which is a load-management situation he’s had for years, and his left quad injury, which he suffered in Week 6 last season and missed the rest of the year for. One ailment is acute, the other chronic.
But which of these injuries is responsible for his continued absence from the practice field? Coming into today’s presser, I think the consensus assumption was at least the quad, if not both ailments. The quad is, after all, the thing that has actually kept him sidelined since last October.
But as it turns out, our long national nightmare may finally be over. GM Mike Borgonzi indicated that Sneed’s quad is not what’s keeping him out of practice at this point, but rather his knee. He shared that Sneed had a clean-up procedure on the chronic injury in May, performed arthroscopically. The recovery from that surgery is why he’s now week-to-week on PUP. And if the insinuation here is that Sneed’s quad is fully-healed, this clarifying update is the best news fans have gotten on Sneed since last October.
Sneed’s knee has been a recurring issue for him since his dominant days in Kansas City. It’s something he’s had to be intentional in his load management with, and something former Chiefs executive Mike Borgonzi was no doubt familiar with in KC. It was baked-in to the equation when the Titans traded for him in the first place, so they worked around it last summer and in the first month of the season. Sneed’s history tells us that this is a manageable situation, and if the surgery in May was just to clean things up, it stands to reason that once he’s healed, he should be better off than he was before.
When will he be healed? All we know is that the team still feels good about him being on schedule to return to play by September. Perhaps that means he’s back at practice in a week or two. Whatever the case, the fact that he’s waiting to heal from a knee scope and not his quad contusion from hell is much, much more reassuring. This quad injury was a proper mystery at times in the past 10 months. It got worse before it got better, the diagnosis of the actual injury changed, and Sneed even underwent injections in the winter to try to jumpstart the healing process. For the better part of this process, we’ve been completely in the dark on his true timeline.
Brinker just showed us the light at the end of the tunnel. Waiting on a scope recovery should be standard. There was nothing standard about the quad. And the team is pleased with Sneed’s hard work to get back out there this summer.
“We're in contact with LJ all the time” said Brinker on Tuesday. “He's worked really hard to get back, and I feel really confident that he's going to be back… He's continuing to be here to rehab. He's been here in the summer, which he didn't have to be. But he's continued to do that, to rehab, and to really work. And I've been in constant communication with him. So we feel good that he's going to be back here at some point. We're in contact with LJ.”
Why get so worked up over Sneed’s return in the first place? Well, because he could be the straw that stirs the drink for the entire Titans defense. And without him, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if things could start to crumble. Read more about those stakes here.
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