Perhaps the biggest blow to the Arizona Cardinals’ season was losing defensive end J.J. Watt to a shoulder injury in Week 7 against his former team, the Houston Texans. He had surgery and hopes to be able to come back at some point, perhaps in the playoffs.

While no one has previously given any exact timetable, head coach Kliff Kingsbury and general manager Steve Keim have simply said they won’t count him out.

However, thanks to an interview Watt gave with Maanav Gupta on his YouTube channel, we now know about how serious the injury was.

“It’s going really well,” Watt said of his rehab and recovery. “It’s going much better than we could have hoped or expected for it to go at this time. I’m feeling really good. I’m doing a lot of stuff to try and push it as hard as I can to smartly and safely get back as fast as I can, but it’s going really well.”

The reports of the severity of his injury were apparently true. He referred to his injury as he “tore everything in his shoulder.” It was reported he tore his labrum, his rotator cuff and his biceps.

He had surgery in Houston and was told “it’s going to take 4-6 months.”

That certainly would not be in time for the playoffs.

He told Gupta he could have felt bad for himself. He hated the timing. He hated that he was going to miss time on a team that was rolling and “had a chance to do something special.”

But he chose to look at it a different way.

“Instead, I said I’m not going to accept that,” he explained. “We’ve got an unelievelable team. I want to see when I can get back.”

He told the doctor to tighten things down as much as he could and that he would do the rest and rehab really hard.

He is lifting weights again and he is doing individual drills while the team practices.

He didn’t say how close he is, but if there is any chance he can be back late in the playoffs, if the Cardinals can make it that far, getting him back on defense would be a huge boost and could propel them to the biggest game of the season.

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