Who Is To Blame For The Wirfs Injury Situation?

The injury to Tampa Bay Buccaneers star left tackle Tristian Wirfs has fans rattled. And who can blame them? Unexpectedly losing the best player on your team at a premium position is equally shocking and damaging.

Especially when it is for an issue that we all believed was a non issue. With Wirfs sustaining this knee injury last season and only missing one game, none of us expected it to be serious. Especially after the coaching staff pretty much confirmed that this offseason.

Wirfs only saw limited action during mandatory mini camp. We saw him working on the side with a brace over his injured knee. Head coach Todd Bowles said that this was percussionary and that he would be ready for training camp. 

Spoiler alert, the injury turned out to be more serious than that. And now Wirfs is going to miss all of training camp and multiple games during the regular season. Bowles and the Bucs were wrong about the Wirfs situation and it will hurt this team.

Now people are looking for someone to blame. A mistake was made and everyone wants accountability. Whose fault is this and what is the team going to do about it?

This is actually a difficult question to answer. So many people help manage these multi-million dollar athletes. Can one person really bear the brunt of the blame when they are mismanaged? 

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The natural name we look at first is Bowles. He is the head coach and everything starts and ends with him. The heat on Bowles is only amplified considering his comments about Bowles during mini camp.

However, this is probably an unfair criticism. A coach is not a doctor and they rely on doctors to help make medical decisions. If the team doctors told him that Wirfs would be fine, then who is Bowles to question that?

Could Bowles have ordered the medical staff to do more investigating on the knee? Possibly. But why cut open your star left tackles knee when the medical staff says they don’t have to.

All the same things could be said of Wirfs himself. He knew that his knee was hurting and he knew it wasn’t getting better like he wanted it to. Wirfs could have got a second opinion or opted for surgery earlier.

But again, why would Wirfs go against his medical team? If the doctor says it isn’t a major injury and that rehab will work then there is no reason to speak out multiple opinions unless you don’t trust your medical team. It could even be irresponsible to get multiple medical opinions outside of your primary doctor who knows you best.

So the theme is that this all comes back to the Buccaneers medical staff. Was it a misdiagnosis to say that rehab would work? Is this setback to the team the Bucs’ doctors fault?

The truth is that we will probably never know. Maybe rehab could have worked but the injury became aggravated. Maybe Wirfs’ knee just didn’t respond how they expected it to. Unless you are a doctor reading this with all the information then we really can’t say.

However, for the knee damage to be worse than expected during surgery comes off as damning. Why didn’t they catch the additional damage when they evaluated Wirfs? Again, we will probably never know.

So to go back to my original question as to whose fault this is, it’s impossible to say. We are left with more questions than answers at this point. However, as an outsider looking in it certainly seems like the Buccaneers medical staff dropped the ball on this and now Wirfs and the team will suffer as a result.