Aaron Rodgers had a rough 2018 season to say the least. The Green Bay Packers missed the postseason for the second straight year and fired longtime head coach Mike McCarthy, and all the while Rodgers was playing through a knee injury that was far more serious than we were led to believe.
Rodgers told The Wilde and Tausch radio show on ESPN Milwaukee on Monday that the knee injury that he suffered in Week 1 against the Chicago Bears was "a tibial plateau fracture and an MCL sprain."
"My two bones that come together on the outside made an indent fracture," the Packers quarterback explained, per ESPN. "The good thing was it's not super weight-bearing but there's definitely some moves that affected it."
After suffering the injury in the first half of the season opener, Rodgers left the game but returned to lead Green Bay to an improbable comeback victory. The QB didn't miss a start for the remainder of the season but often looked as if he was still bothered or immobilized by the early knee issue. Now we know why.
A "tibial plateau fracture" is the same injury that caused Houston Texans star J.J. Watt to miss the final three months of the 2017 season. Rodgers called the injury "very painful," which given Watt's diagnosis seems like an understatement in hindsight.
In addition to providing specifics about his Week 1 injury, Rodgers detailed the concussion he suffered in the Week 17 finale against the Detroit Lions, which knocked him out of the game.
"I'm proud of the fact that I started 16 games. It's disappointing how it ended, getting that concussion was disappointing and also a little scary, honestly," Rodgers explained. "I couldn't see. I lost vision, definitely peripheral. I got hit, and I came over to the sideline, and I came back out there for that third series, the normal peripheral shrunk to like blinders."
Given the injuries he was battling, Rodgers' subpar season (by his standards) can be placed in better context.
The QB's injury comments came in the same interview where he responded to a recent Bleacher Report article that covered the end of the McCarthy era in Green Bay. Rodgers called the article a "smear attack" littered with "a number of inaccurate or incorrect opinions or facts."