Amari Rodgers Races to NFL with Timeline-Defying ACL Recovery

The average NFL player returns to action following a torn ACL in about a year. Amari Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers' third-round pick, returned to action at Clemson in less than six months.

Author:
Bill Huber
Publish date:
May 19, 2021 12:09 PM EDT

GREEN BAY, Wis. – On March 25, 2019, Clemson receiver Amari Rodgers suffered a torn ACL during spring practice.

Exactly 760 days later, he was selected in the third round of the 2021 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers.

It’s what happened in between that is absolutely astounding.

According to a 2019 study published in the National Library of Medicine, the average time between ACL tear and return to play among NFL players was almost 50 weeks.

Rodgers’ goal was just over 23 weeks. Not to run. Not to start doing football-related drills. Not even to return to practice. No, Rodgers’ preposterous goal was to play in Clemson’s opener against Georgia Tech on Aug. 29, 2019.

“I was concerned,” Rodgers’ father, Tee Martin, said from his office during a break in his duties as Baltimore Ravens receivers coach. “I had a couple receivers who had ACL injuries in spring practice, and none of them were themselves when they came back and they took longer than Amari. But, Amari told me before he went under for surgery, he said, ‘I’m not going to miss a game.’ I’m looking at him like, ‘Dude, you’re going to miss the first half of the season.’”

During the week leading up to the opener against Georgia Tech, Rodgers returned to practice. He went through pregame drills but didn’t play. A week later and just 166 days after the injury, Rodgers caught two passes against Texas A&M. A week after that, he caught four passes for 121 yards and two touchdowns at Syracuse. Highlighting it all: an 87-yard moment of triumph. On third-and-1 from the 13, Rodgers caught a receiver screen at the 9, stiff-armed an Orange defender to the turf and turned on the jets for a touchdown.

Under the best of circumstances, returning to action in nine months is an impressive recovery. Rodgers was on the field in less than six months.

“I just attacked rehab,” Rodgers said after the Packers drafted him. “Every single day, doing rehab two or three times a day, most of the time three. I would go in the morning before we lifted and then come back after lunch and class and do a session, and then I paid out of pocket and went somewhere else too at night. I was just grinding. I hated sitting out and seeing my brothers work out and do stuff every single day that I wasn’t able to, so I worked hard every single day so I could get back out there.”

Steven Martin, Clemson’s team physician, performed the surgery.

“During the rehab process, we normally give patients questionnaires on how they feel, just the mental side of it. But I didn’t do that with Amari,” Martin told SI.com’s Ross Dellenger in 2019. “I asked him one simple question: ‘How do you feel?’ He said, ‘I’m Amari.’ I sat there and didn’t know what that meant. He said, ‘I feel like I’m normal. I’m Amari.’ I knew he was good.”

The surgery consists of taking a strip of the patella tendon from the kneecap and using it to replace the ACL. Martin goes a step further. As detailed by Dellenger, Clemson’s doctors soak the tendon in liquid containing stem cells taken from the player’s bone marrow. Martin also injected stem cells at four different locations during the attachment phase.

The next day, Rodgers showed up at the Clemson training room with no bruising or swelling. That put Rodgers ahead in his recovery from the start. From there, it was all gas, no brake.

“He tried everything during rehab to get ahead on his rehab. He told himself that he was going to come back before the first game and he did,” said Martin, the legendary University of Tennessee quarterback, former receivers coach of Randall Cobb at Kentucky and first-year assistant with the Ravens.

Rodgers rehabbed with a maniacal focus to reach his improbable goal. Beginning in mid-April, he ran on an underwater treadmill early in the morning. After breakfast and class, he’d return for his official rehab session, which included workouts with weights strapped to his right ankle. By July, he was running – a feat that had his dad equal parts amazed and worried.

“Yeah, I told him [to slow down] several times,” Martin said. ““I didn’t want him to go too fast and it became a deal that became chronic throughout his game. I was looking at the long game of, ‘What is it going to look like your senior year?’ He could have taken a medical redshirt but he had it in his mind that he was going to leave as a senior and not redshirt. That was part of his motivation was to not miss a season and be there for his teammates. He wanted to be there for his team and be a part of a potential national championship-winning team.”

Rodgers was back but, the Syracuse game notwithstanding, he wasn’t really back. In 13 games, he caught 30 passes for 426 yards and two touchdowns. Over the final five games, he recorded only 61 receiving yards.

With the injury having disappeared into the rearview mirror, Rodgers turned in a sensational senior season. In 12 games, he caught 77 passes for 1,020 yards and seven touchdowns. In two games against Notre Dame, he torched the Fighting Irish for 16 receptions for 255 yards. Among receivers in the draft class, he ranked fifth with 8.0 yards after the catch per catch, according to Sports Info Solutions. His 17 forced missed tackles trailed only UCF’s Marlon Williams (22), Florida’s Kadarius Toney (20) and Ole Miss’ Elijah Moore (18).

“His junior year, the ACL injury really hampered him,” Clemson receivers coach Tyler Grisham said recently. “He had a brace on all year. Whether he knew it or not, he just wasn’t 100 percent, and you could tell by his play. He was favoring it at times. If you’re playing in the slot, you have to have elite change of direction, explosion, suddenness in and out of your breaks, and he wasn’t able to perform at the level that he could because of that injury. He came back so fast and he was legitimately healthy enough to return to play. He had an 80-something-yard reception [against Syracuse] that he took the house and stiff-armed a dude and outran the rest of the defense. But, you look at the totality of his play and it wasn’t to his standard.

“So, he got the brace off, he got fully healthy, he got confident that he was healthy and he played confident and he played fast. Really, really fast. He worked his tail off. He knew this was his last year and he was going to give it all he had for his last hurrah, and he made the plays, man. He was what we expected him to be and then some.”

The Packers have high expectations for Rodgers, which is why general manager Brian Gutekunst traded away a fourth-round pick to move up in the third round to get the slot receiver the team has lacked since Cobb dominated for a stretch of a few seasons in the mid-2010s.

It wasn’t just the talent and schematic fit that attracted Gutekunst to Rodgers. He called Rodgers a “pro from an early age,” a statement amplified by Rodgers’ perhaps unprecedented comeback.

“I want to be that story kids can look up to, look up to me when they go through something like I did and know that it will be OK,” Rodgers told Dellenger. “It’s about your mindset and how, if you have the right mindset, you can definitely bounce back and come back stronger than before.”