Nick Saban had a front-row seat to one of football’s more unusual medical breakthroughs, and on Friday he walked Pat McAfee through how it changed the way high ankle sprains were handled.
The conversation came after Miami receiver Malachi Toney was announced Wednesday as needing surgery this week, a development that will keep him out of the No. 1 Hurricanes’ trip to face No.
11 Notre Dame. The injury is believed to be one Toney can recover from in time to return for Miami’s title push, and Saban knows the treatment well.
Back in 2018, Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa suffered a high ankle sprain against Tennessee, and Saban said Alabama’s medical staff introduced him to the “tightrope” procedure.
“Well, we had a great medical staff,” Saban said on the Pat McAfee show on Friday. “Dr.
Andrews and Dr. Kane were our medical staff out of Birmingham, and they do a lot of stuff for NFL guys through the years, but they came up with this procedure; at least, they were the ones that told me about it.”
Saban explained the operation as an alternative to the older routes: waiting it out with rest and rehab, or putting screws into the tibia and fibula and essentially locking them together.
In tightrope fixation, surgeons pass a high-strength suture through small holes in the bone, secure it with small metal buttons, and then tighten it like a zip tie.
He then broke down the injury in plain terms.
“You know, a high ankle sprain is when the two bones where they come together in your ankle are tied together with a ligament, and those bones separate when you have a high ankle sprain,” he said. “So they just said, ‘Ok, let’s wire them together, and we don’t need the ligament.’ Take a couple weeks to fix it, but it won’t take six weeks to come back so that you can play.”
Saban also pointed to another Alabama example. Cam Robinson, he said, had a high ankle sprain at Tennessee, sat through the bye week, and then played at LSU two weeks later and played well.
“We had Cam Robinson, who was a great left tackle for us, had a high ankle at Tennessee; we had a bye week, he played at LSU two weeks later and played well,” he said.
From there, the procedure spread inside Alabama’s program.
“And then we used it over and over and over with high ankle sprains, which is a tough injury to rehab from if you don’t have this surgery.”
McAfee joked that it sounded like Saban had invented something just to beat football.
“It was like, of course, Saban just created something new just to beat football,” McAfee joked on the show. “Because sprained ankles have been taking out football [players] forever, and then it just so happens to come from this little West Virginia coal miner’s brain in an operation down there.”
Saban laughed and shot back, “Another full of s-t moment there,”
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