Injuries are an unavoidable part of football, no matter how careful teams are from training camp all the way through a season. The Chicago Bears have been hit fairly hard to this point, though, with multiple key players missing time to varying levels of concern or extent.
To be fair, some positive news about some injured Bears players has come. Wide receiver Luther Burden (groin) is expected to be good to go for Week 1, and rookie wide receiver Zavion Thomas (knee) is not expected to miss much time.
As the Bears go through another training camp trying to figure out who their left tackle will be, frontrunner Braxton Jones is missing practice time due to an injury. That is opening the door for Jedrick Wills and Kiran Amegadjie to get more work with the starters, so time will tell what happens there in the coming weeks.
NFL insider offers a welcome injury update for the Bears
Albert Breer of SI.com was at Bears' training camp on Sunday, and he, of course, had some notes about the left tackle situation.
"There’s a lot less certainty opposite (Darnell) Wright, where Braxton Jones, Jedrick Wills and Kiran Amegadjie are duking it out to start at left tackle. Both Jones and Wills have been healthy, which is a plus. But with Jones out Sunday, Amegadjie took the reps with the starters."
"And it looks like Ozzy Trapilo, who started six regular-season games at left tackle, then tore his patellar tendon in the wild-card round, might be back sooner than expected."
The last word we got about Trapilo was how he was working out in the weight room. The broad expectation all along has been that he'll miss at least most of this season, if not the entire campaign, due to the severity of his injury. Not to mention it happened in January.
Breer's "might be back sooner than expected" report about Trapilo is, as expected, vague. He likely had someone with the team tell him that, perhaps prompted by a question in light of the bigger picture at left tackle, with a boundary for putting something out there publicly that had to be navigated.
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Until further notice, there's a whole lot of unknown about when Trapilo could return, and Breer's note doesn't change that at all. Any kind of positive injury news out of Bears' camp is automatically good news right now, though, so we'll take a vaguely positive update on the man who will hopefully, eventually, lock down Caleb Williams' blind side for years to come.
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