If you’re like us, you tuned into Saturday night to see if Duke could upset #11 ranked Notre Dame, only to watch the Blue Devils fall in the final seconds. However, the major concern after the game centered around a fall taken by Duke starting quarterback Riley Leonard. Leonard was tackled awkwardly in the final seconds of the game and went down clutching his ankle. In that moment, it looked as if Leonard could be out for the rest of the year with a major foot/ankle injury.
Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Dr. Silverman offers his opinion on the mechanism of injury and Leonard’s probable timeline for return. Here’s a look at the play during which Leonard was injured.
Dr. Silverman Comments
I watched a few different angles of this play and slowed down the video to get a better understanding of what happened here. Leonard appears to be in a significant amount of pain, and although his injury is being classified as a high ankle sprain, that doesn’t really tell the whole story of what goes on during this type of injury.
To get a high ankle sprain, you need to disrupt the ligaments that connect the tibia – the large bone in the front of your leg – to the fibula. The injury also varies in severity, ranging from mild all the way to a Grade III sprain, which involves ruptures of all three ligaments at the level of the ankle that connect these two bones. However, that doesn’t even cover the amount of injury that can happen with these sprains. In more serious high ankle sprains, the damage can extend higher up the ankle and into the lower foot, where soft tissue damage, nerve trauma and muscle problems can occur.
Let’s look at through a positive lens and say Leonard has a stable high ankle sprain. The average return timeline for this type of sprain is between 14 and 57 days. If he has an unstable sprain, he needs open surgical treatment. This can be done using arthroscopic methods in which small cameras help reduce the joint before the ligament is repaired through small incisions.
Return to weight-bearing in either injury may take four weeks, then physical therapy could start with weight-bearing. A realistic timeline for Leonard is as follows:
Stable High Ankle Sprain – Four weeks
Unstable High Ankle Sprain – Eight weeks if surgery is necessary
So far we haven’t heard any plans for surgery, so the four week timeline seems to be the most realistic. Duke has a bye this week before playing NC State and Florida State. It seems highly unlikely Leonard would play in those games, but October 28 against Louisville may be his current target. A more reasonable timeline would bump him back at least a week for a home matchup on November 2 against Wake Forest, but we’ll see how his recovery progresses over the next couple of weeks. We wish this young man all the best in his recovery.