Inside scary neck injury of Miami Dolphins' Alexander Mattison | Habib
admin_news
MIAMI GARDENS — Alexander Mattison wasn’t scared at first.
He didn’t think the injury was serious.
“A neck stinger,” he figured.
Then came words from doctors that were scary, followed by phrases even scarier.
“Hearing the word ‘fracture,’ ” he said.
And: “Do you have someone that you want us to call?”
Only an hour or two earlier, Mattison had been one of the standouts of Miami Dolphins training camp. The free agent from the Las Vegas Raiders arrived as the power running back the team needed, yet showed flashes of speed that were unexpected, forcing you to reel in your imagination, reminding yourself it’s only August.
But then …
… Then, all Mattison knew was he was staring up at those lights in some hospital room in Chicago, getting told he had a fractured neck and was being prepped for emergency surgery.
“I don’t think I was scared until doctors told me what happened,” he said.
What happened was he’d fallen on his head while being tackled in a preseason game, leaving him with not only a fractured neck, but a dislocation. Eventually, in the interest of brevity, Mattison would simplify it.
“When I talked to, like, friends and family, I just, yeah, ‘broke it.’ ”
Alexander Mattison hopes to be back with Dolphins in 2026
Best to pause it there and fast-forward to the present day and a time to exhale. Mattison is doing OK. He not only obviously survived what could have been a life-threatening situation, he’s healing to the point that he hopes to rejoin the Dolphins in 2026 — with his doctors’ blessing. Although no two injuries are the same, it also must be noted that other players have come back from major neck injuries, including Peyton Manning and Asante Samuel.
“Their main concern is not about whether I risk re-injuring, necessarily,” said Mattison, publicly discussing what he endured at length for the first time. “It’s more so, am I able to sustain the contact?”
That’s a question still playing out. Contact is part of life for any running back, but especially for Mattison, who makes a living running through people, not around them.
That’s how it was back on Aug. 10, late in the Dolphins’ preseason-opener against the Bears. He caught a pass from Quinn Ewers and turned it into a 21-yard reception to set up a 1-yard touchdown run by rookie Ollie Gordon II that Mattison didn’t get to enjoy.
Shortly after signing with the Dolphins last spring, Mattison said, “There’s probably 10 different ways that you can get tackled on every single play.”
When Mattison was tackled by safety Alex Cook, the landing couldn’t have been worse.
“I was running through open space,” he said. “I saw a defender coming and tried to cut across him, but he gave me the olé and pulled my momentum into the ground. I went head first into the ground. Laws of physics, I’m not going to win that battle.”
Even amid the shock of finding himself in the operating room, a reassuring feeling came over Mattison.
“The doctor, he did an amazing job in making sure that I felt well aware of everything that was going on,” Mattison said. “Made sure I felt great about what they were going to do, and then made me feel good about the fact that after this happens, it’ll be ‘X’ amount of time where you have to do this, have to do that. We should heal up well and we’ll just make sure that we monitor you back to wherever you want to be in life.”
On the football field — that might be the knee-jerk reaction to where he wants to be. There’s plenty to be said for that, but Mattison has a wife and young kids. Being there for them is his highest priority, which is why he said if he reaches the end of his rehab road and doctors won’t green-light his comeback, he’ll “definitely” heed their warning. But they’ve given him no indication it’ll come to that.
Even though rehab has gone smoothly, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been challenging. He’s still at the stage where he can handle so much weight. Running, jumping, range of motion — it’s all coming back at its own pace. Mattison said he’s not pushing things. Yet.
“Just trying to let the bones and everything heal,” he said.
That’s the physical side. Half of it.
“I truly felt gutted that the opportunity itself, the potential of opportunities, was just taken away in an instant,” he said. “The progress that I had made to that point, just taken away in an instant. That was definitely hard.
“So it took me a little while to mentally come out of a little bit of a dark spot.”
That was then.
“As of right now, I feel really strong, I feel really confident,” he said. “So it’s a matter of just getting to the point where I can push the boundaries a little bit.”
Coming back from a fractured neck, maybe he already has.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Dolphins' Alexander Mattison takes us inside scary fractured neck injury
