Hi everyone! I really appreciate all of the great questions you submitted this week. Would love to hear from you for future editions, so make sure you check out the contact information at the bottom of the page.
We’ll get into why hamstrings the potential returns of Malcolm Mitchell, Chris Hogan and Matthew Slater, plus follow-ups on Martellus Bennett and Gordon Hayward, but we’ll start with whether or not the Patriots might have acquired an advantage over the Raiders by staying in Colorado for the week.
Do we have an advantage over OAK by training this week and a bit of last week at altitude? (The Wolf, @Captmike24)
Hi, The Wolf! The answer to your question is a strong maybe.
The Patriots will have been staying at altitude for a total of 10 days prior to gamely at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City on Sunday. Their training became at 5,280 feet above sea level in Denver and then the team traveled to Colorado Springs to train at 7,258 feet at the Air Force Academy the remainder of the week.
It was no surprise to me that Bill Belichick seized the opportunity to get a competitive edge by buying his team some time to acclimate to high-altitude conditions. The act of the human body getting used to higher elevations is called “altitude acclimatization.” The basic concept is that the air pressure (not oxygen concentration) is much lower at high altitude than at sea level. Because of this, it’s much harder for the body to absorb and distribute oxygen to the muscles during exercise.
Within a few hours of acclimatization, the body is already trying to fix the situation. One of the immediate responses is that the body tries to concentrate the blood so that for every mL of blood the body is working hard to pump to the muscle cells, there is an increased amount of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Heart rate and breathing rate also increase to supply more oxygen per minute. These things would happen in Denver and Mexico City even if the team came home in between. However, it’s the more midrange changes in the body that the Patriots can hopefully capitalize on.
Within the first 10-20 days at altitude, the body is already producing more red blood cells (increasing the hematocrit) and making extra little energy factories called mitochondria in cells to aid with energizing the muscles and brain cells under low-oxygen conditions. I have seen some doctors remark that these changes cannot occur after only 10 days of training at altitude, but that is false. Studies have shown that mid-distance runners who trained at altitude for 10 days showed improvement in race performance at altitude at the end of the training period. At least a few Patriots players remarked yesterday that they felt bad for a couple of days but are feeling much better after a few practices and rest at altitude.
This week, Patriots players likely experienced earlier fatigue, heavier-feeling muscles, thicker body secretions, faster heart and respiratory rates, possibly headaches and even nausea/decreased appetites in response to the higher altitude in Colorado Springs (is that what David Andrews is dealing with?). Hopefully, many of those symptoms will improve by the time they travel to Mexico City tomorrow.
Is the acclimatization process far enough long after 10 days to give a definitive performance edge to the Patriots? It’s difficult to say for sure. I do think that some athletes will see a benefit, and possibly one that will continue to benefit them in the coming weeks as they return to sea level. However, at the end of the day, it may be the team bonding that comes from a week away in the beautiful landscape of a lauded U.S. military academy that may give the Patriots the most boost.
Who do you think returns to game action first: Hogan, Mitchell or Slater? (DN, @DN617)
Hogan and Slater, what’s the deal? They’ve been VERY quiet on Hogan, IMO it is a partial separation that will be healed come playoffs, thoughts on that? (Just what I saw/been through myself) Also been quiet on Mitchell, no surgery but a knee injury? That’s not the usual…? (Sam Busby, @sam_busby14)
The Patriots are pretty thin at the wide receiver position of late, so these are great questions, I’m going to try to address each injury individually and then answer the return to play question.
Chris Hogan: Hogan went down with a right shoulder injury on October 29 after taking a helmet to his right upper arm. Last week he was spotted in the Patriots’ locker room still in a sling and he did not make the trip out West with the team. Unfortunately, Hogan’s injury video doesn’t give me enough information to know exactly what the injury is. Given the hit to the upper arm, my early suspicion was an AC joint sprain. In any case, the fact that he is still in a sling two weeks after the injury indicates that it likely will not be a 2-3 week injury. Once he is out of his sling he will need to do some rehab which, I suspect, will put him at a 4-6 week recovery.
Malcolm Mitchell: Mitchell is on IR with a knee injury and has a possibility of being designated to return. This knee has a significant injury history. He tore his right ACL in college and had it reconstructed. A few months later, he returned to the operating room for a second surgery to address a meniscus tear. In Week 16 last season he seemed tore-aggravated the knee reeling in a pass downfield. It was an odd injury, because the video was not at all concerning for an injury. It was more that the wideout came up limping afterwards. Mitchell missed two games after this seemingly minor injury and appeared to struggle at times with knee discomfort for the remainder of the season. He returned to Patriots’ practice this pre-season but repeatedly came up grabbing his right knee in pre-season games. He was placed on IR in early September and recent reports from ESPN’s Mike Reiss say that the wide receiver has recently started running again. Given Mitchell’s knee history, my concern is that he has a more degenerative process going on. If this were a simple meniscus tear, I would have expected offseason surgery, which we have not heard about. This seems to be a situation in which Mitchell’s medical team is hoping that an extended period of rest and rehab (possibly with stem cell or PRP, steroid injections?) may help quiet down what appears to be a chronic issue. The fact that he just started running again recently means that I don’t expect to see Mitchell back on the field for at least another four weeks as he gradually works his way back up to sprinting and hard change of direction.
Matthew Slater: During the preseason, Slater sustained a significant hamstring injury. It caused Belichick to take a break from running practice to visit Slater in the medical tent and kept the special teams captain off of the field for over 8 weeks. That’s a long time to be away from the field with a hamstring injury. There have been a few instances since where I thought I saw him coming off the field a bit slowly or limping slightly but nothing concerning until what looked like a re-injury to the hamstring last weekend in Denver. While he was seen standing around after the game smiling, it was clear that this injury would be a major setback for his season. The good news is that I do not think that this is the type of injury that will require surgery (usually reserved for acute rupture of the tendon from its bony attachment), but I would anticipate that they will keep him off of the field while he fully recovers. I suspect that may mean that he will be out until the playoffs.
So….that would put my best guess at order of return to play at:
- Hogan
- Mitchell (if he returns at all this season)
- Slater