Jerry Jones on the status of La’el Collins: “We don’t know. I don’t know. The doctors don’t know.”

We have reached Week 4 of the 2020 season which means that players placed on injured reserve before everything began are now eligible to return. Notable players for the Dallas Cowboys that fit this qualification are Sean Lee and La’el Collins. It was reported that The General underwent hernia surgery and could be out until mid-October, but the status of right tackle La’el Collins is still very unknown.

Last week there was a report that Collins “does not appear on track” to be activated during the first week that he is eligible to do so, but we are now at a point where questions are starting to hang over more than Week 4. Mike McCarthy said during his Monday press conference that Collins is dealing with something that “obviously is significant” but this is the extent to which the Dallas Cowboys are willing to discuss what’s going on. Until now. Sort of.

Jerry Jones: We don’t know. I don’t know. The doctors don’t know.

Jerry Jones took the radio airwaves of 105.3 The Fan on Tuesday morning and offered up a bit more perspective on Collins... if you want to call it that. Jerry noted that nobody knows what is going on with Collins, seriously. Here is his full answer.

“Accept what I’m fixing to say. We don’t know. I don’t know. The doctors don’t know. And so we are trying to work through some structure issues. We’re trying to work through those relative to those. I’m going to compare this to inactivity with Covid. One begets the other. The less activity you can have sometimes in these injuries or in these health issues, the harder it is to get it better. And you can have something else that’s preventing you from doing the things you need to do to get better at another part of your body. And that’s what’s happening here.”

“And so we’re trying to, the reason that you’re not hearing something definitive… as you well know. If you’re going to have a problem in the NFL, because of the length of the season, when you start off in early August or late July, the best time to have anything corrective that identifies with surgery is right then. The quicker you can do it, if you’re going to have to do it, the better off you are. Because of the length of the season you can basically have surgery sometimes in July and you can be sitting in there a month before the playoffs and be back helping your team. That happens. So you want to do it early.”

“The reason you don’t do it early is because if necessary you have moved along and there at that gap of how to manage it so you can get the most time for the season. Every player wants to do that and certainly the team does. So we’ve been easing along so that we can see if we can get more time that way with Collins. And that’s the process that you see going on. The doctors, the trainers, the owner does not know when it’s going to be at a point that he can do some other things that have him ready to go in a week or two. So it’s still there, it’s still working, it’s still possible for him to play, the longer you go, the less optimistic you get.”

Jerry was the one who first brought up the idea of surgery in talking about Collins, and as you can see, noted the benefits of having it done as early as possible in terms of any player so that proper healing can take place. That is obviously common sense.

It sounds like there truly is a lot of unknown when it comes to Collins, which is certainly frustrating especially in the game of hindsight. Hopefully there is some clarity regarding Collins moving forward one way or the other so this situation can find some resolution.

For now, we wait.