August 13, 2025
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The Eagles are hoping to have Landon Dickerson back in time for Week 1.
The energy at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday night shifted quickly from excitement to concern.
Late into the team's annual open practice under the stadium lights, Landon Dickerson got tangled up at the line and went down.
The Pro Bowl left guard sat on the ground for a few minutes while trainers took a look at him and his surrounding teammates to took knees. Eventually, he was helped off the field and to a table behind the sideline, but struggled to put weight on his right leg.
A cart took him back to the locker room, and that kicked off a wait well into Monday for fans fearing that the Eagles had just lost a vital piece of what's long been their stellar offensive line.
Then the reports came in.
Dickerson had an MRI done on his right knee, which revealed a meniscus injury that will need a "minor procedure" to repair. The Eagles will list him as "week-to-week," but in the hopes that he'll stay on track to play in the Week 1 opener against Dallas on Sept. 4.
That timeline gives Dickerson and the Eagles a window of about three weeks, which doesn't seem like a lot of time to work with at face value, but isn't an unheard of recovery pace either – especially if the meniscus injury is minor.
To gain a better understanding of what Dickerson might be dealing with, Dr. Dinesh Dhanaraj, the Attending Orthopedic Surgeon at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, offered his outside expertise.
Before getting into it, though, a note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and guest authors and do not reflect any official policy or position of any NFL team or a team's athletic physicians.
The meniscus is a C-shaped cartilage disc in the knee that primarily functions as a shock absorber between your leg's tibia and femur, Dr. Dhanaraj explained. So when you walk, run, jump – or in Dickerson's case, bear down to block or shift laterally from side to side – the meniscus helps reduce the force of impact in the knee.
But it can tear, and the bigger someone is, the more force that goes through the knee, which can make any damage to the meniscus more painful. Dickerson is listed at 6'6" and 332 pounds.
There are levels to how severely a meniscus can tear, too. The major ones, like complex tears, "bucket handle" tears, or full detachments that need to be heavily repaired and sewn back, unsurprisingly, are the ones that take a long time to come back from, Dr. Dhanaraj said, falling anywhere in a range of 3-6 months.
The more minor ones, though, can be a much quicker process, ranging from 3-6 weeks, which Dickerson appears to have fallen into.
"Not all tears are created equal within the meniscus," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "Some are minor tears where there's an edge that's frayed, getting caught, and you can do what's called a partial mineseptemy or a 'shave down job.' You can just trim that torn edge away.
"We tell people it acts like a torn piece of carpet under a door that's getting caught. You just smooth that carpet down, and honestly, that recovery is fast. They say 4-6 weeks, but honestly, I've seen them go 3-6 weeks even, so that can be a quick recovery."
Which lends to optimism for Dickerson and the Eagles that the star left guard can be back fast.
History lends to another concern, though, at least to the average eye.
This latest knee injury for Dickerson adds to an already uneasy list of ailments and surgeries that he's had going back to his college days at Alabama, and at only 26 years old, that can create worry about his long-term availability.
But Dr. Dhanaraj has a bit of a different view on that.
That Dickerson is only having a "minor procedure" on the meniscus is the key here.
Yes, it does add another surgery to his injury history, but speaking to what's typical among NFL offensive linemen and the demands of their position, those types of minor procedures (sometimes even multiple ones through their 20s) aren't uncommon.
"Yeah, if you're 26 and just kind of a regular person off the street, that amount of injury and that amount of surgery is abnormal," Dr. Dhanaraj said. "But in the NFL, it's really not."
Nor is the ability for a player to bounce back without issue if the procedure is a success and the rehab all goes according to plan.
Dickerson has already done that a few times before, even as recently as this past Super Bowl run with his left knee.
He, the Eagles, and all the fans are hoping he'll be able to do it again in the chase for a repeat.
"I don't think it's going to necessarily predispose him to a lot of problems this season," Dr. Dhanaraj opined about Dickerson's knee. "We've seen a lot of guys kind of go down and come right back. I'm hoping that's going to be the case for him."
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