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Aaron Kampman explains why he thinks his knee is stronger after ACL surgery

Tania Ganguli's Blog

It can take a football player a very long time to recover to full strength from an ACL surgery.

Take Jaguars guard Vince Manuwai, for example. He tore his ACL in the first game of the 2008 season and didn't fully recover until this offseason.

Aaron Kampman will be starting a new season less than a year after the same major knee surgery. Kampman's operation was December 4. Kampman knows so much about the surgery, he gave us a bit of a science lesson this morning during his availability.

"The reality is, when you study the science of it, the particular surgery that I had, the graft that I used, I used my own tendon and what that does is, it actually ligamentizes those capillaries and that tendon actually becomes a ligament," Kampman said. "It's actually stronger. So I believe, in my mind, that I have a stronger knee than I did before I got injured. I think that's a good thing."

The other option for ACL replacement surgery is using a ligament out of a cadaver. Kampman opted, instead, to use a piece from the patellar tendon in his knee. Kampman's surgeon told him the normal patellar tendon is 36 millimeters, but his was 48 millimeters, so he had plenty left over after the surgery.

More questions followed and Kampman went into even more detail, with hand gestures and all, about how that surgery works and how knees work.

"You want to get into the science of it?" Kampman asked.


"Alright," he said. "You've got a patellar tendon. And they take out a bone plug. And they take out part of your patellar tendon and another bone plug of your knee cap and that becomes your new ACL. They fixate it to the tibial plateau and then up to the femur with screws and that's your new ACL. You make an X [makes an X with his arms] like this you've got an ACL and a PCL in your knee and an LCL and MCL and those are your four major ligaments in your knee. And your ACL is the one they replace."

How did he learn so much about it?

Well, given that the surgery is a pretty big deal, Kampman wanted to be educated. A friend of his, who is a physical therapist, helped him understand.

"I've learned quite a bit, I really have," Kampman said. "I've been a guy that's always studied his body. I think part of being a professional is knowing a lot about what we do, you got to know how it works. So I've learned a lot."

As for his expectations for his knee, full strength is what Kampman wants. Whether or not he gets that he said he won't be able to assess until playing real games. That is, more than the 13 plays he got Saturday night against the Dolphins. 

"Ask me about halfway through the season and that way I can give a real apples to apples comparison," Kampman said.

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