An MRI on ADP: Fantasy Football Medical Analysis

I’m excited to introduce LegUp’s newest author, Artrell, a sports medicine trained physician with multiple years of experience at the D1 level of collegiate athletics. This summer, Artrell has been helping us behind the scenes to dial in our injury input for the Sidekick and LegUp ranks.

With the final weekend of fantasy drafts approaching, we want to provide subscribers with an injury prognostication deep dive to help you make the best decisions in drafts and inform your early season outlook on key injuries. 

-Pat

As a sports medicine trained physician who has been on the sidelines covering high level D1 collegiate athletics for several years, I’m uniquely equipped to use my knowledge of acute injury management to assist with real time injury prognostication. This allows us as a team at Legendary Upside to use evidence based medicine in order to provide timely, data driven updates to the Leg Up community faster than anyone else in the industry. 

In the upcoming sections, I will plan to provide a short breakdown of the most up to date medical literature used to serve as the backbone for realistic return to play timelines that drove our sim inputs this summer. I will also provide a short fantasy spin to each situation and list my current exposure to these players (through ~125 BBM on both DK and UD at the time of writing). I will go through some of the perceived wins and losses (cough, cough, Nabers) of the offseason with a clean conscience, knowing that the data shall prove my innocence if standing for trial at the Hague. In the wise words of Sackreligious (with inspiration from MLK) “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it will ALWAYS bend towards data backed analysis.”

With the best ball regular season draft window winding down, we figured there was no better time to finally drop some injury information from behind the Sidekick curtain. We hope that this gives you all an immense sense of confidence in knowing that Legendary Upside will continue to set the industry standard for injury prognostication in the many best ball seasons to come.

Now let’s get into the meat of this article, diving deeper into several of the key players whose current or previous absences will shape the story of our upcoming season.

Malik Nabers

Injury Breakdown

Initial injury details: Right ACL and Lateral Meniscus Tear 

• Initial surgery date of October 28th, 2025 for repair of ACL + Meniscus. 
• Repeat surgery in April 2026 for cyclops lesion removal

Aggregated analysis demonstrates a mean return to play timeline for ACL + Meniscus of ~340 days (~11.3 months) in comparison to ~ 9 months as seen with isolated ACL’s. Repairing the meniscus prolongs his time course by an additional two months. 

340 days from Nabers surgery date is October 3rd (one day before their week 4 matchup). 

He then had a post operative complication with the development of a cyclops lesion. You may ask, what the heck is a cyclops lesion? 

A cyclops lesion is a post surgical complication of an ACL repair when a lump of fibrous scar tissue forms at the front of the knee. It was named secondarily to its bulbous appearance and central areas of reddish/blue discoloration from venous supply that resemble the single eye of the cyclops under arthroscopy.