Veteran Cowboys linebacker Sean Lee is injured and unavailable for training. Dude, if we had a dime for every time we heard that one, we’d have enough money to cover the cost of Lee’s one-year $ 4.5 deal for the 2020 season. Okay, that might be overkill, but you get the gist of it. Lee is injured a lot. In fact, here’s his injury history over his 10-year NFL career.
That’s a total of 40 games in his ten seasons in the league (160 possible games), which means Lee has been out of action for 25% of his entire career. Meanwhile, he has missed at least five games in five different seasons. This equates to a 50/50 chance that Lee will pass the season without any injuries, which keeps him on the sidelines for more than two games. This is not a good chance.
He carried the same availability ratio at Penn State with two healthy seasons and two injured seasons. Sadly, the two he was injured turned out to be knee injuries in his last two in college, which inevitably hampered his project.
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It is such a misfortune to lose a player like Lee because he has been absolutely superb when he is healthy and on the pitch. The Cowboys have mitigated some of the risk by building contract extensions that are weighted by the number of games (or in some cases percentage of snaps) he actually plays. It’s a way to keep Lee under contract without the team absorbing all the financial risks.
So it doesn’t faze anyone when the news broke that Lee suffered some type of undisclosed injury during the strength and conditioning phase of the offseason. Luckily for Dallas, the defense is much better equipped to handle Lee’s absence as they have two young stars in Jaylon Smith and Leighton Vander Esch. While Lee serves as a no. 3 guys, the team also had solid depth after him in the form of Joe Thomas, Justin March and a couple of young UDFAs Luke Gifford and Francis Bernard.
Lee just completed his first full 16-game season last year (in 2016 he was healthy in Week 17 as the Cowboys had nothing to play), where he did a good job replacing Vander. Esch who missed seven games. with a neck injury. There were times he would show a part of that old Lee that we used to see, but other times you could see his age catching up with him. Although he only played on 59% of defensive shots (the ninth-most), he led the team with 14 missed tackles last year.
The Cowboys will go into the coming season taking what they can get from Lee. Even in full health, he will play a shortened defense role, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could open the door for those young guys like Gifford or Bernard to get some meaningful shots at some point in the season. And there is no better player / coach than Lee to help bring these young guys. Sean Lee lives to learn, and his understanding of the job would be such a good thing to transfer to his teammates.
For now, Lee’s injury is not a cause for concern. If history has taught us anything, there is nothing wrong with tempering our expectations, but this may be the only time its sidelining hasn’t been so bad.
