Missouri got Ahmad Hardy back on the practice field this week, but that does not mean the Tigers have any clearer idea when he’ll actually play.
Hardy, who sustained a gunshot wound to his left leg in May, has returned to working out with the team after missing all football activity since the shooting. Head coach Eli Drinkwitz said Monday’s practice went well, but Missouri is still taking this one day at a time and has not set any kind of firm return date.
“I really don’t really have a timeline,” the seventh-year Mizzou head coach said. “I don’t know if he’ll be back for Arkansas.
I don’t know if he’ll be back for Texas. I don’t know if he’ll be back for the bowl game.
Nobody knows.”
Drinkwitz said the staff wants to see Hardy string together at least two weeks of practice before considering him for game action, but even that comes with a huge asterisk. Hardy is expected to play with a rod in his leg, and the coaching staff is monitoring everything from how he feels after practice to how his body responds from one day to the next.
“There’s never been anybody that we’ve experienced have to go through this. So for me to put an artificial timeline on that creates an expectation and then disappointment to you and the fans and everybody else, because he can’t meet something that he has no control over, or I have no control over.
“We’re really just going based off he practiced yesterday, everything went good, but it’s really going to be about ‘how does he feel today,’ because we don’t know if he can do a back-to-back practice, and then how does that translate till tomorrow? So, there’s no timeline on if this, then this, then this. It’s, hey, we’ll see how today goes, and then we’ll figure out what tomorrow looks like and go from there.
The recovery process is more complicated than the typical football injury, Drinkwitz said, because of the nature of the wound and the surgery that followed. The staff has to keep tabs on bone healing, the wound itself and how Hardy handles having a rod placed into his femur.
“It’s a lot more challenging than I think maybe a hamstring injury or an ACL injury or something like that,” Drinkwitz said. “The invasive nature of the recovery, based off of the bullet entry and the surgery that occurred, there’s a lot of things there that have to go right continuously for him to be able to continue to ... return to play football at a high level.
So you’re having to monitor all that from the bone healing to the wound to how does his body respond to having a rod placed into his femur. There’s a lot of different things there that, you know, there’s just not (an) X-ray that tells you he’s ready to go.”
For Hardy, the return to practice is a major step after a stretch away from the game. The All-Sun Belt transfer from Louisiana Monroe exploded for Missouri last season, leading the SEC with 1,649 rushing yards and 6.4 yards per carry while scoring 16 touchdowns. He topped 100 rushing yards in each of his first five games, later ripped off 300 yards against Mississippi State and finished as one of three finalists for the Doak Walker Award.
His injury came in May, when he was shot while leaving a concert in his home state of Mississippi. Since then, he had not practiced or played until this week.
Missouri’s players noticed the difference as soon as Hardy got back out there. Defensive end Daeden Hopkins said the moment was a big one for the locker room.
“It was awesome,” defensive end Daeden Hopkins said. “He was very excited. So it was awesome.”
Quarterback Austin Simmons said seeing Hardy cutting again felt surreal after so much time away.
“It was great having him back at practice yesterday,” quarterback Austin Simmons said. “Honestly, it’s actually pretty wild seeing him for the first time in a while, going out there doing his job and seeing him make those cuts like he used to back in the day. ...
He was really excited. Did a little Tiger jacks at the beginning of practice, and you could tell how excited he was.”
Even without Hardy, Missouri’s ground game has held up. Senior Jamal Roberts has stepped into a starring role, scoring eight touchdowns and piling up 867 rushing yards, which ranks fifth in FBS. He was held to a season-low 39 yards on 20 carries against Ole Miss, but his production has kept the Tigers moving.
Missouri is 5-2 overall and 2-2 in SEC play heading into the stretch run. The Tigers are coming off a bye week and have five SEC games left on the schedule.
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