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Daniel Oyefusi, ESPN
BEREA, Ohio — Four days before making his season debut against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 7, Cleveland Browns running back Nick Chubb wrote a story in The Players Tribune reflecting on his long journey back to the field.
Thirteen months prior, in a Week 2 Monday night game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Chubb tore his left MCL and sustained damage to his meniscus and medial capsule — his second major left knee injury — ending his 2023 season and leaving the Browns without a player often referred to as the “heart and soul” of their team.
In the story, Chubb, who described himself as a “closed-off guy,” touched on several topics: the grueling nature of his rehab and his appreciation for the fan support throughout, the impact of his mother and grandmother on his upbringing, as well as the “dark thoughts” that entered his mind in the immediate aftermath of the injury.
“They might not be able to put me back together again this time. This might be a wrap,” he recalled thinking as he lay on the ground at Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh.
Chubb’s recovery comes full circle when the Browns face the Steelers on Thursday (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video) for the first time since the injury. Players and coaches say they are unaware of a player coming back from two major knee injuries as serious as Chubb’s. In the five games since he returned, he has yet to rediscover the form that made him a Pro Bowler in four of his first five NFL seasons, but the significance of his presence on the field has captivated the team and the blue-collar city he’s come to personify since being drafted to the Browns in 2018.
“Nick’s a pretty special football player,” Browns coach Kevin Stefanski said. “He’s a pretty special person. I think he embodies a lot of what we want to be as Cleveland Browns and certainly I think our fans feel that from him. And for me, from my chair, I get to watch him work, and I get to see the fruits of his labor. … So, I’ve gotten to witness this journey, if you will, from back to last year and how hard he’s worked. So, I think that just resonates with our fan base.”
CHUBB WAS THE last of the offensive starters to be introduced before his season debut Oct. 20, and the entire stadium at Huntington Bank Field came to their feet to give him a standing ovation. The cheers were especially pronounced as they drowned out the boos for quarterback Deshaun Watson, who was introduced right before Chubb. The applause for Chubb was a stark contrast from the scene of his last football game.
On Sept. 18, 2023, Chubb took a shotgun handoff near the goal line early in the second quarter of the Browns’ Week 2 “Monday Night Football” game against the Steelers. As he worked through traffic and attempted to plow into the end zone, linebacker Cole Holcomb grabbed at Chubb’s shoulders and attempted to drag him down. Safety Minkah Fitzpatrick came in sprinting from the end zone and dropped his helmet into Chubb’s left leg, which bent backward.
As players returned to their feet, Chubb remained on the ground, clutching his leg. Wide receiver Elijah Moore grabbed Chubb’s hand to pick him up but the pain was too much. Chubb took his helmet off and rolled over as athletic trainers rushed to the field.
When the replay was shown, the crowd at Acrisure Stadium collectively gasped. Stefanski shook his head with an expressionless look on his face.
“When you see Nick stay down, you know something serious is going on,” Browns assistant athletic trainer Patrick Rock, who tended to Chubb on the field, told ESPN.
Chubb was helped onto a cart and driven to a nearby hospital. Soon after, the Browns announced he had suffered a “significant” knee injury. It was the second major injury that Chubb suffered to his left knee; he tore an MCL, PCL and LCL in 2015 at the University of Georgia.
The Browns overcame myriad injuries to return to the playoffs in 2023, but their dominant running game engineered by Chubb dipped in his absence. And Chubb was back on another arduous rehabilitation process.
When asked about writing the piece in The Players Tribune, Chubb said, “People only see me on Sundays, and they don’t know what it’s been like this past year. It’s been a lot of downs. Lot of hard work. Lot of stress. So, that kind of gives them a little insight on what’s actually been going on.”
CHUBB UNDERWENT THE first of two surgeries in late September 2023, repairing the medial capsule, meniscus and MCL in his left knee. He had a second surgery to repair damage to his ACL that November.
Early on, the extent of Chubb’s rehab was just icing the swelling in his knee. The brunt of the work occurred in the offseason.
“You come in at 8, 9 o’clock, or whatever the start time is,” Rock told ESPN, “and you work pretty much the entire morning until about 1, 2 o’clock every day, whether it’s in the training room or the weight room of just strength training, rehab, attacking it from all angles, training his upper body while he can’t train his lower body, introducing some lower body as he can.”
Multiple checkpoints gave Chubb confidence he would return to the field. By April, Chubb was running without assistance at the team’s practice facility.
“I don’t think he was happy with how it looked that first time,” Rock told ESPN. “I remember looking at the video of him kind of looking back at his stride, and he had a knee brace on, which he did not like wearing. … As a running back, it’s tough to cut and jump and do all the things you want to do with a brace on.
“So, I do remember vividly him looking back at his stride, being like, ‘What the hell, I know this don’t look right.’ And then me showing the video, and him like, ‘Ugh.’ And then kind of watching how he progressed. … It’s cool to see the improvement over time.”
The same week Chubb began running, he and the Browns reworked the final year of his contract. Chubb had a base salary of $11.8 million but none of it was guaranteed. Needing cap space, the Browns could have cut him, which Chubb acknowledged in his The Players Tribune piece.
“Listen, I’m 28 years old,” he wrote. “What’s that in running back years these days? 57? I know the business. I saw the rumors.”
But the two sides agreed on a new deal that lowered Chubb’s salary but will allow him to earn up to $12.2 million based on performance levels he was achieving prior to his injury, a source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter. It was a desired resolution on both sides and a show of faith from the Browns’ organization despite Chubb being in the midst of his rehab.
“His big thing through the whole process was just get me under a bar,” Rock recalled. “Once I squat, I know I’ll be good.”
In July, Chubb posted a video of him squatting over 500 pounds at a gym in his hometown of Cedartown, Georgia.
When training camp opened, Chubb worked around the team’s schedule, starting most of his work before the sun came up and meetings began.
Ninety minutes after the second day of Browns training camp concluded, Chubb and running back Nyheim Hines, who was also returning from a severe knee injury, stood on one of the fields at The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia with a few onlooking athletic trainers.
For the next half-hour or so, Chubb ran full-speed sprints and conducted light agility work, shuffling his feet through cones as his right arm tucked a football into his chest.
The late July workout was the first reporters had witnessed since Chubb injured his knee in September 2023. Standing atop a short hill several yards away, co-owner Jimmy Haslam watched from afar.
“If anybody can do it, it’s Nick Chubb,” Haslam said the next day. “So, we’re excited to see what can happen.”
Chubb was placed on the physically unable to perform list, prohibiting him from participating in team practices during training camp, but he was designated to return to practice Oct. 2.
“His work ethic and his whole demeanor, the way he approaches the game and the way he approaches the week is infectious,” offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey said.
CHUBB STOOD IN front of a backdrop in the Browns’ locker room four days before his Week 7 debut.
By now, Chubb’s anticipated return date was well-known, and as his teammates filtered into the locker room after a pre-practice walk-through, shouts and hollers filled the room when they saw Chubb. A slight grin crept onto the face of the normally stoic Chubb, who seeks to avoid the limelight. He later joked that he “miss[ed] those days” when he could walk around anonymously as he did in the opening scene of HBO’s “Hard Knocks” in 2018, and a Browns fan didn’t recognize him at Cleveland International Airport.
The night before the Browns’ game against the Bengals, Chubb addressed the team as a game-day captain (Stefanski later named Chubb a captain for the remainder of the season). Chubb downplayed the short speech — “It was my first game back and just excited to get out there. It was a long time coming,” he told ESPN.
But the moment resonated with his teammates.
“It was just a cool moment, because I see how hard he works,” center Ethan Pocic told ESPN. “It’s surprising but it’s not surprising that it’s him doing it. He’s tough as nails, works so hard, so it wasn’t surprising at the end of the day because that’s who he is.”
Right guard Wyatt Teller said Chubb’s actions outweighed anything he could have said.
“I don’t mean that in a negative way but it’s just, like, whatever he’s saying, we already know that he’s doing the work behind that,” Teller said. “I don’t think there’s anybody who’s come back from this injury twice and he’s done it. And I just pray he continues to heal and we get better each week and hopefully get him back to that level of dominance that he was used to every week.”
In his first game in over a year, Chubb scored on a 1-yard run, as he made his way past defenders and spun into the end zone. The momentous day, though, was overshadowed by the Browns’ fifth straight loss and Watson’s ruptured Achilles, an injury that was met with cheers from fans that irked teammates. However, the game was still another milestone for Chubb, and he kept the ball with which he scored.
“That one was special,” Chubb said.
CHUBB’S RETURN HASN’T been enough to lift an offense that has reached 20 points once this season.
The team has limited his workload, and he’s ran for 163 yards in four games, averaging 3.1 yards per carry behind an offensive line that ranks 25th in run block win rate. It’s a mark well below his 5.2-yard career average that only trails Jamaal Charles in NFL history. But there have been signs, from shedding tackles and breaking into the second level, of Chubb getting back the form of a player who was named to four straight Pro Bowls before his injury.
“Every time I go out there, practice or a game, I feel a little better. I feel good now,” Chubb said. “… I just need to go out there and keep doing what I’m doing and being patient and it will come.”
Chubb’s long-term future in Cleveland remains uncertain. He turns 29 in December and will be an unrestricted free agent after the season. At 2-8 and with one of the oldest rosters in the NFL, the Browns face multiple tough personnel decisions in the offseason.
However, Chubb, in his latest comeback, remains a well-respected figure.
“He’s one of the cornerstones of the city,” defensive end Myles Garrett said. “Not only the team but of Cleveland. So, it’s always nice to see his face. Can’t say hear his voice because he doesn’t say much. But, I mean, the guy’s just a small beacon of hope.”
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