GREEN BAY, Wis. – MarShawn Lloyd’s second NFL season is over before it began.
Lloyd, whose two-year NFL career has been plagued by a torrent of injuries, suffered a hamstring injury at practice on Thursday. With Lloyd entering the final week of his 21-day practice window after opening the season on injured reserve, coach Matt LaFleur implied that his season was over.
“I’m not going to say no but I think you can use deductive reasoning on that one,” LaFleur said on Tuesday as the team gets ready for Saturday night’s showdown at the Chicago Bears.
A third-round pick in 2024, Lloyd has played in one game in his NFL career. He played 10 snaps as a rookie due to hip, hamstring and ankle injuries, an appendectomy and, finally, another hamstring issue.
Late last season, Lloyd met with specialists at the University of Wisconsin in hopes of getting a handle on his problems.
Instead, this year, he missed part of the early portion of training camp with a groin injury, then suffered a hamstring injury while making an impressive 33-yard catch in the preseason game at Indianapolis.
This time, Lloyd met with specialists at Meyer Institute of Sports in El Segundo, Calif., which is headed by Dr. John Meyer, the chairman of performance, health and wellness for the Los Angeles Clippers and the director of player health and performance for the Los Angeles Kings.
“Did get answers,” Lloyd said after his first practice upon being designated for return. “Don’t want to say specifics but definitely got some good answers so that’s why I’m able to do what I’m doing right now.”
When the injury report came out later that day, Lloyd was listed as limited participation. Not with the hamstring but with a calf.
Now, it’s the hamstring again.
“It’s one of those things that’s very, very, very unfortunate, because this guy has worked his ass off to battle back,” LaFleur said. “To be in that spot again, it’s just what do you say to him? We’ll continue to investigate and try to figure out why this keeps occurring but it’s certainly unfortunate, and I feel bad – I really do. I feel extremely bad for MarShawn.”
With that, Lloyd won’t be back on the practice field until organized team activities in May. That’s a lot of time for more “why me” questions.
“A lot. A lot,” he said a couple weeks ago of asking those questions. “But you got to deal with it. I had one of my teammates came up to me and asked me, he was like, ‘How do you do it?’ And I’m like, I don’t know. Like it’s hard. It’s definitely hard, but you got to keep your faith. You got to keep your faith and you got to keep good people around you just to make sure you keep yourself in the right mind.”
There could be some help from injured reserve this week. Defensive end Brenton Cox is starting his third week of practice after suffering a groin injury in the opener against Detroit. He was full participation at the final practice of last week and would be a logical candidate to take the place of Micah Parsons on the roster.
“He did” make an impact last year, LaFleur said. “He did a really nice job. I thought he was having a good early part to the year and, unfortunately, got injured. He’s been looking good in practice; we’ll see what that amounts to over the course of the week.”
Cox had four sacks in the final seven games of last season and could be part of the village of people necessary to replace Parsons.
On a short week, the Packers held a walk-through in lieu of an actual practice on Tuesday.
“It’s a big mental day,” LaFleur said. “Tomorrow we’ll have kind of a modified practice, depending upon how we get out of today, just getting a gauge of where everybody’s at. But that’s pretty par for the course, I would say, for most teams this time of year, especially when you’re on a short week.
“You want to get them the plan as quickly as possible, so they have time to digest it. We all know the magnitude of this game. It’s going to be a great challenge for us, in their house. We just saw them two weeks ago, so it should be pretty exciting.”
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