Myles Garrett Placed on Injured Reserve by Rams After Knee Procedure, Out at Least Four Games
The Los Angeles Rams traded for Myles Garrett to win a Super Bowl. Five days into the season, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year is on injured reserve after a knee procedure, and his head coach cannot tell you when he is coming back.
Garrett will miss at least four games. Sean McVay said Monday that he does not know whether Garrett will be available after those four weeks. There is no timetable, which is a polite way of saying nobody in the building knows how this ends.
Here is the part that should bother Rams fans. Garrett dealt with knee swelling through training camp and the preseason. As recently as Sept. 8, the team expected him to play. Then they put him on a plane to Melbourne, Australia, for the league’s first game on that continent, and asked a player with a bad knee to be the best defensive player in football 10,000 miles from home.
He finished with no tackles and no sacks in a 27-7 loss to the San Francisco 49ers.
McVay said the quiet part out loud
“Thought we would take an approach where he’d be feeling good enough to go contribute positive change and be the player that he’s capable of,” McVay said. “That wasn’t the case. And so the next right thing for us is to be able to get this thing fixed.”
Credit McVay for not dressing that up. But read it again. The plan was hope. The team crossed its fingers that a knee that had been swelling for six weeks would cooperate in a season opener played on the other side of the world, after an aggressive travel schedule, and it did not cooperate.
Nobody needed Garrett to play in Week 1. The Rams were the popular Super Bowl pick entering the season, which means they were built for January, not for Sept. 11 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. If the knee needed to be fixed, and it clearly did, the smarter version of this story is Garrett having the procedure in August and the Rams surviving September without him.
Instead they got a non-factor in a blowout loss and then lost him anyway, except now the clock starts in mid-September rather than mid-August.
The trade cost makes this sting more
Los Angeles sent Cleveland a package that included Jared Verse, the 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year, to land Garrett this offseason. That is the kind of deal you make when you believe a two-time Defensive Player of the Year is the last piece. It is also the kind of deal that gets re-litigated every week he is not on the field.
The roster around him is thinner than advertised right now, too. Aaron Donald, who came out of retirement to rejoin the Rams, did not travel to Melbourne and was inactive for the opener. So the Rams opened the season with a defensive front missing both of the names that made them scary, lost by 20, and then announced surgery.
None of this is fatal. Four games is four games, and if Garrett returns close to on schedule, the Rams have plenty of runway to be exactly what everyone predicted. But the honest read on Week 1 is that the Rams made a risky call on a player’s health, the risk did not pay off, and they are now in a worse position than if they had simply been patient.
The next four weeks will tell us whether this was a detour or the start of something worse. Given that McVay would not commit to a return date, do not be surprised if it runs longer than four.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.