Tafisi Makes Complete Recovery from 2019 Neck Injury ... Last Week

MJ Tafisi felt nothing.

Zero. Zip. Nada.

He had no sensation in either shoulder or his neck area.

Twenty-two months ago on a cool fall night at Arizona, the University of Washington inside linebacker raced up to stop a screen pass, made impact and he couldn't get off the ground.

Gingerly, he was lifted up and put on a makeshift stretcher, transported off the field on a motorized cart and delivered by ambulance to a Tucson hospital.

Tafisi suffered what is known as "a stringer," best described as a nerve injury caused by a football player's shoulder going one way and his neck moving in another direction on contact. He missed the second half of the 2019 season because of the scary injury.

It took 3 to 4 months for him to feel the nerves, as he put it, "fire up" again.

While he was cleared to play in all four Husky games last season, the 6-foot, 230-pound sophomore from West Jordan, Utah, didn't feel totally recovered and regain complete confidence in what he was doing until just last week.

In a 9-on-7 drill, Tafisi hit a lead-blocking fullback head on to blow up the play.

"I threw my whole weight against it," he said. "That was also me testing to see if I could take it or not. I hit him and it felt pretty good. After that hit, I felt I could start doing it more and more."

He was luckier than Laiatu Latu, the UW outside linebacker who hurt his neck in practice last fall and had to medically retire because the injury left him vulnerable to more serious repercussions.

Tafisi never thought he couldn't play football again, but the recovery was painstaking. He began by curling a 5-pound barbell. A month later, he graduated to 10 pounds.

"There was a part of me that it was going to last, I don't want to say a lifetime, but longer than it did," he said. "I'm happy it didn't."

Tafisi stands as the Huskies' third inside linebacker behind starters Eddie Ulofoshio and Jackson Sirmon, and he could replace either if needed with very little dropoff.

He's appeared in 11 UW football games and back on track to contend for a bigger role. He's 10 pounds lighter than he was before the stinger.

"At first it was tough," Tafisi said. "But I knew if I could keep working and stayed consistent with it, I would start to build that confidence again."

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