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Gardner Minshew mania took the NFL by storm in 2019 when the 6-foot-1 rookie took over at quarterback for the Jaguars after Nick Foles suffered a collarbone injury last season. The jorts-wearing, mustached-donned gunslinger from Brandon, Miss. earned the starting job outright for 2020 but has struggled to find the same success through the first seven weeks of the season and was in danger of being benched in favor of Mike Glennon on Sunday. Part of his struggles can probably be attributed to a pretty severe hand injury that his team knew nothing about until this week.
X-rays during this week revealed that Jaguars’ QB Gardner Minshew II has multiple fractures and a strained ligament in his right thumb, sources told ESPN.
Minshew has had discomfort in his thumb since Oct. 11 at Houston. Jaguars didn’t know about Minshew’s injury until this week
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) October 29, 2020
If I am to understand this correctly, Minshew injured his thumb in Jacksonville’s 30-14 loss to Houston three weeks ago and has been playing with multiple fractures and a strained ligament without telling anyone within the organization. While I’d imagine that the team would have preferred to know about his ailment when it first happened, this comes as no surprise from the Uncle Rico lookalike.
As the story goes, when Minshew first arrived at East Carolina after transferring from Northwest Mississippi Community College, he had two senior quarterbacks ahead of him on the depth chart and planned to redshirt that season. When circumstance led him to seeing action in the later half of a midseason game, he determined that a medical redshirt was the only way to preserve his remaining three years of eligibility. But the problem was, he wasn’t injured.
In an effort to change that reality, Minshew went home and grabbed a hammer and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He proceeded to smash his throwing hand with said hammer, trying to break it. The first attempt didn’t work, so he tried four more times to no success. When the coaches asked him what happened, Minshew told them that he had slammed his hand in a car door. He ended up playing in seven games with “a swollen ass hand” that season.
The Jaguars have not said whether Minshew will suit up for the team’s game against the Texans on Sunday, but he is clearly no stranger to playing through pain.