Status unclear for Peterson after he tears right meniscus
Minnesota running back Adrian Peterson has a torn meniscus in his right knee, head coach Mike Zimmer said Monday.
Zimmer announced the nature of the injury while recording his weekly appearance on a radio show and said he has not ruled out Peterson for the game Sunday against Carolina. One option is surgery. “We are going through the evaluation process to figure out what the next procedure will be,” Zimmer told reporters.
Peterson, the 2012 NFL MVP, was injured in the third quarter of the Vikings’ 17-14 victory over Green Bay on Sunday night on a 5-yard run, his longest of the night. He needed crutches to exit the stadium.
Peterson has long had a reputation as a fast healer, which was never more clear than when he tore the ACL in his left knee with two weeks to play in the 2011 season and still made it back to start the 2012 season. A torn meniscus is considered much less serious than a torn ACL, but it often calls for several weeks of rehab before a player is ready to take the field again.
“Anytime you have a guy like that in a leadership role that does go down, obviously everyone kind of takes a step back,” defensive captain Brian Robison said. “You never want to see guys go down like that. But at the end of the day, you understand that there is still a task at hand. This is the NFL, and that’s going to happen.” Seahawks fined: Seattle head coach Pete Carroll was fined $200,000, and the Seahawks were fined $400,000 and will lose a fifth-round draft choice for violating the NFL’s work rules on contact in the offseason.
The Seahawks will forfeit the draft pick in 2017 and also lose a week of organized team activities for allowing excessive contact in an OTA on June 6, which is prohibited by the labor agreement with the players’ union.
The league on Monday cited Carroll as “responsible for maintaining appropriate control over practices and intervening if prohibited conduct occurs.”
The decision was made after the league and the NFL Players Association independently reviewed the on-field practice video for June 6. Both sides agreed the Seahawks violated the no-live-contact rules.
This is the second time the Seahawks have been penalized by the league for violating offseason-workout protocols. Seattle had two minicamp practices taken away in June 2015 for contact-rules violations during the 2014 offseason. Seattle’s players were allowed to attend meetings, but were limited to one day of on-field work. Briefly: San Diego placed running back Danny Woodhead on seasonending injured reserve with a torn ACL in his right knee. Woodhead was hurt when he was tackled after a catch in the first quarter of a 38-14 victory against Jacksonville. He missed most of the 2014 season with a broken ankle . ... Denver’s DeMarcus Ware will undergo surgery Tuesday on his broken right forearm and is expected to miss four or five weeks, head coach Gary Kubiak said. A lumbar-disk problem kept Ware out of five games last season before he returned for the playoffs and had a dozen quarterback hits. He was hurt when he ran into Von Miller while chasing down Indianapolis quarterback Andrew Luck on Sunday . ... Cleveland quarterback Josh McCown will miss at least one game with a sprained left shoulder, an injury that will force head coach Hue Jackson to play rookie Cody Kessler at Miami on Sunday. The Browns are signing free-agent quarterback Charlie Whitehurst, the 34-year-old who spent last season with Tennessee and Indianapolis, after losing McCown and Robert Griffin III, who broke a bone in his left shoulder in the season opener . ... Jacksonville left tackle Kelvin Beachum was released from a hospital in San Diego after sustaining a concussion in the third quarter Sunday. He was strapped to a backboard, carted off the field and taken to a local hospital, where he stayed overnight for observation. The team says Beachum was placed in the NFL’s concussion protocol . ... Carolina running back Jonathan Stewart could miss a week or two with a right hamstring injury. He injured his hamstring in the first quarter of the Panthers’ 46-27 win over the 49ers . ... Washington nose tackle Kedric Golston is headed to injured reserve with an injured right hamstring. Golston was hurt on the first play from scrimmage in a loss to Dallas . ... Tennessee right guard Chance Warmack has a torn tendon in a finger on his right hand and might require surgery.