IS BUYING CROSS-COUNTRY SKIS
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.
Paul Domowitch has been with the Daily News since 1982. He has spent most of his 27 years at 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 came to the Daily News from the Fort Worth (Tx.) Star-Telegram, where he covered some god-awful Texas Ranger baseball teams. His first beat at the Daily News actually wa s boxing, which he covered just long enough to lose two sports coats to blood spatter before moving on to football. Domo and his wife Shelley, a University of Oklahoma grad and very dangerous to be around following a Sooner loss, have been married 29 years and have raised 2 terrific daughters – Allison, 26, a lawyer and graduate of Boston University School of Law; and Amy, 23, who graduated from Clemson and works in marketing and sales for a professional baseball team.
