The truth about controversial sidelining of exciting Titans defender revealed by sports medicine expert on ACL recovery details
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The truth about controversial sidelining of exciting Titans defender revealed by sports medicine expert on ACL recovery details originally appeared on A to Z Sports.
Last week, the Tennessee Titans hit Atlanta for a pair of joint practices and their second preseason game of the season. It was an exciting week of useful work and insightful roster battle developments. But one person we didn’t learn anything new about was Tennessee’s 3rd Round rookie. That’s because S Kevin Winston Jr. was only around in street clothes.
The week before hitting the road for their 10-day preseason road trip, the Titans practiced five days out of six, fully padded. Winston was seen leaving the practice field that Sunday (August 3rd) with trainers, and hasn’t been back on the practice field since. Head coach Brian Callahan has maintained his absence has been cautionary management of soreness and general return from ACL repair, and he’s expected to be back this week.
This has drawn a lot of sideways looks from fans and media alike. On the surface, it’s easy for this to smell fishy like a lot of offseason injury situations sometimes become. It’s not above NFL teams to fib or flat out lie about things like this from time to time, and recent Titans happenings (like Treylon Burks' ACL, or L’Jarius Sneed’s knee scope) have left fans of this team slow to trust.
I’ve done some digging on this situation, both on the Titans side of things as well as on the sports medicine side of things. First, let me reiterate what I said last week on X: it’s not that deep on this one. Winston is returning from an ACL. Pushing through soreness or strains of any kind with the major muscles surround the knee is how you develop chronic secondary issues. He’s a super exciting young player, but they don’t need him right away this season. This really is out of an abundance of caution.
Now, that’s not to say he didn’t have a minor muscle strain or something of that nature on that leg. But the primary driver of him sitting out the past couple weeks was ACL recovery caution.
I also had the opportunity to speak with Dave Kempfert, the Director of Rehabilitation Services at the Bone and Joint Institute of Tennessee. A lot of what he had to say about ACL recovery lines up almost perfectly with what I uncovered from those in the know on Winston, and his medical expertise is what we should all lean on to best understand how these situations work. So don’t take random internet guy’s word for it (myself included), take this instead:
Returning To Play From an ACL Tear
Let’s back things up for a moment. Winston tore his ACL on September 7th, 2024. Penn State was playing Bowling Green. With that in mind, I started by asking Kempfert for a general overview of the return to physical activity timeline for an ACL tear.
“Now when we're talking about ramping back up to NFL speed and conditioning, shape, or contact, and you're getting to that five-to-seven month mark, you're really looking at a return to advanced running and sports-specific conditioning on top of strength and agility work.”
Winston somewhat surprisingly ran a 40-yard dash at Penn State’s Pro Day on Friday, March 28th. It was an impressive 4.45-4.50 unofficial time, just 6 months and 21 days removed from the tear.
“As you start getting to seven-to-nine months, you're looking more for controlled contact and return to play preparation. So you're really increasing your focus on reactivity and not just planned activity at that point, and gradually progressing back to contact. And then your return to sport timelines are usually anywhere between nine-to-twelve months. And of course, there's no cookbook for this. There are all varying degrees of when you send somebody back.”
The day Winston left training camp practice was just shy of the 11 month mark. Opening day will be exactly 1 year removed from his tear. Everything about his recovery is tracking with what Kempfert laid out here. So what are the biggest concerns or risks at the very end of the recovery process?
“Obviously the the biggest thing on people's minds early on is re-injury of the graft. But when you're in those later ranges, you've gone through the process of all those things, so you're feeling really good about the graft strength at that time… so one of the main things you're looking at is asymmetry of motion. Are you ineffective in your motion and it's leading to abnormal motions, lack of efficiency, loss of power, loss of strength? It's everything from your joint angles, to your effort, to your conditioning, to the amount of strength and power you've built up over the last nine-plus months of rehab.”
It’s also about related stress on the rest of the body in the affected area, Kempfert explained:
“You also don't want to put any unnecessary stresses on adjacent joints, so especially the joints above and below the knee when we're talking about an ACL. We're talking about ankle issues, hip issues, low back issues, those types of things.”
So what do you look for to shut it down, like the Titans did with Winston earlier this month?
“The big things would be sharp pains, rapid increase in swelling—especially if it's associated with a decreased range of motion—function, pain, those type of things. But you also want to look at just managing the athlete properly. You want to make sure that you're ramping up progressively. So you don't want soreness that's lasting too long… it's just a measure of volume activity, if it's too high or if the load is too much for that stage of the rehab process. So you're monitoring the soreness as well. We all know that you’ve got to callus the body for return to sport. In the clinic we always say nothing mimics sport but sport.”
This is all in line with my understanding of Winston’s rest and recovery, and it’s great insight going forward for any ACL recovery in the NFL.
This story was originally reported by A to Z Sports on Aug 17, 2025, where it first appeared.
