Kansas City Chiefs RB Jamaal Charles sat down with the Fantasy Focus podcast team to talk about how he is recovering from ACL surgery.
I was able to transcribe the entire interview. Check it out.
"It’s goin real good. I’m about to start back running. Probably close, it’ll probably be in the next two or three weeks. The first two weeks was stressed out with the surgery, being in a lot of pain but after the fourth, fifth week I felt much better and I’m moving around a lot better. I’m starting to like jog right now so I’m feeling happy and ready to go."
Much more from Charles after the jump.
On how his physical therapist are treating him:
"At first it was hard! I didn’t want to go. They were playing with my scar and right when I got the surgery they were pushing on my leg and bending it and pushing it. It was horrible. But now like, I got all my flexibility back. It feel real good right now but the first three, five days was the worst I ever…and I wouldn’t wish nothing like this on nobody."
On the new coaching situation and how it might affect him:
"No. I’m just trying to get ready and get myself back to how I’ve been in the past. The only thing I worry about is me right now and trying to get my legs back healthy and hope that I can get faster and get stronger. I hope this can help me right now. The coaches go out there, I mean the GM goes out there and looks for a new coach and I come in and be ready to play for whoever coaches next year and that’s the goal."
On what doctors have told him about a timeline for a return:
"I think I should be ready by OTA’s, working out with the team. I got hurt early so I had a lot more time to like, to get myself back and it only takes six months. So by the time OTA’s it should be like eight, seven months."
On if he’s getting complaints from people who drafted him in fantasy football:
"I’m starting to hate fantasy. People don’t have…criticizing me like I wanted to get hurt this year.I love football to death, I have a passion for football. It’s something that happened and it’s football and injuries happen in football. A lot of people come up to me and like ‘you caused my season’ like, man I have a real life situation. It’s not a fake situation. It’s a real life situation that can affect my whole family and everything."
On a scale of 1-10, how much of a man is Thomas Jones?
"He’s a man, I’ll tell you that. Thomas is kind of like a sweet, sweet sweetheart. He’s a good person. I guess, you know what I’m saying, don’t mess with the man. He’s a grown man at the same time he got a good heart for people too also, you know what I’m saying?"
Has he talked to Cassel?
"Matt’s doing the same. Matt’s just trying to get back to his self. He just had himself a baby girl so he’s just trying to enjoy himself right now and get himself ready for next year. We all had to go through a bad situation. Now we need to have an early mini-camp, more OTA’s and we got to get ourselves ready for the…I think the OTA’s are gonna help us real good with the team, the way it was playing. You can’t fault the team with the way they did this year without me, Berry and Tony Moeaki and Cassel. They was playin real great and the defense is real good but it’s like, they don’t have Berry up in there and the offense was doing pretty good when they don’t have like me helping them out in the running game. I feel like come next year, it’s gonna be awesome."
On having the same injury as Tony Moeaki and Eric Berry:
"We all see eye to eye with each other, we all, cause we actually have somebody to be like ‘how did you sleep at night’ and everybody’s like ‘man, I can’t do it. I can’t sleep at night.’” Tony Moeaki is like a week ahead of Berry and Berry’s a week ahead of me so we can ask each other ‘how your pain feel this week?’ and it’s kind of funny that it feel exactly the same way.It only makes us hungry and makes us want to work harder because we aren’t out there with our teammates and we always have these conversations that we’re going to come back and do this and come back like Green Bay with all the injuries. It’s just motivating right now to come back real strong cause we all gotta start back over from scratch and we don’t want no doubts about ‘he hurt his knee’ and this and that. We all want to come back strong."
It is good to hear Jamaal and the boys are on the mend. Here’s hoping they are close to 100% in time for OTA’s.