CAN HEAR CLEARWATER CALLING
Eagles All-Pro guard Shawn Andrews had back disc surgery Tuesday in Southern California and will be out at least 6 weeks, team head athletic trainer Rick Burkholder said Wednesday. The Eagles have 10 games remaining.
The surgery was performed by Dr. Robert Watkins, who also operated on fellow Eagles offensive lineman Tra Thomas in 2005. Burkholder said the Andrews and Thomas injuries were "similar but not identical."
Burkholder said Andrews suffered a disc herniation in high school in Arkansas, which didn't bother him after he took a pain-blocking injection. Burkholder said Andrews played through college and his early pro career with the problem, but aggravated it when double-teamed on an extra point against Dallas in Week 2.
Burkholder said Andrews took a couple of injections in late September but found only brief relief. The Eagles had sent Andrews to a number of specialists; Watkins was the fourth opinion on the injury.
Burkholder said recovery time from having the herniated portion of the disc removed can range from 6 weeks to 3 months; the Eagles have not placed Andrews on IR. Head coach Andy Reid said they want to get a read on how Andrews progresses in the next several weeks.
Max Jean-Gilles will remain in the lineup in Andrews' absence."Max has done a very good job," said Reid, who said Jean-Gilles has improved each week.
Obviously, had Andrews undergone surgery right after being injured, he would be a month into his recovery by now. But surgery is rarely a first resort, and the fact that Andrews played pain-free several years after having the site injected gave reasonable hope that surgery could be avoided.
The Eagles returned to their normal game-week routine today to get ready for Sunday's game against Atlanta.
Les
Bowen has covered the Eagles for the Daily News
since 2002.
Before that, he spent nearly 13 years covering the Flyers. It took Les
only a few seasons after the switch to figure out that there was no
penalty box at the Linc, and that the time really wasn't his, despite
what Andy Reid kept saying. Les came to Philadelphia and the Daily News
from Charlotte in 1983. In the intervening years, he has pretty much
lost track of NASCAR, and his accent. He, his wife Barbara, and their
two sons live in Haddon Township, New Jersey.
E-mail Les at bowenl@phillynews.com
and follow
him on Twitter.
Paul
Domowitch has been with the Daily News since 1982.
He has spent most of his nearly 3 decades with the paper covering the
Eagles and pro football. For the last 10 years, he’s been a
selector for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A native of Wilkes-Barre
and a graduate of Wilkes University, Domo started his career in Texas,
working first for the Midland Reporter-Telegram (1976-78), and then for
the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he covered some god-awful Texas
Ranger baseball teams. His first beat at the Daily News actually was
boxing, which he covered just long enough to lose 2 sports coats to
blood spatter before moving on to football. Domo and his wife Shelley,
a University of Oklahoma grad who still hasn’t gotten over
that Fiesta Bowl loss to Boise State 5 years ago, have 2 terrific
daughters -- Allison, 28, who is an attorney in South Jersey, and Amy,
25, who works in administration for a professional baseball team.
E-mail Domo at PDomo@aol.com and follow
him on Twitter.
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