Did Von Miller call out the Bills after playing through traumatic knee injury?

In the 2022 offseason, the Buffalo Bills signed 33-year-old Von Miller to an impressive six-year, $120 million deal. With that kind of money, you’re betting on a player to be nothing less than a top-tier game-changer. 

For most of the 2022 season, he was a game changer, but not THE game changer; he logged eight sacks in 11 games. It was Week 11 when he ended up tearing his ACL and was out for the rest of the season.

We’re talking about a player over 30, with a devastating knee injury. Sure, if he was anywhere from 24 to 28 years old, he might have been able bounce back quicker, but that’s not what the Bills were dealing with. 

Miller returned in Week 5 of the 2023 season and proceeded to have the worst campaign of his 13-year NFL career, registering only three tackles in the regular season.

Is this the case of a player getting smacked in the face by his age, or is it a player coming back entirely too early after having his knee turned to goo? Miller thinks it’s the latter.

Von Miller is not happy with his recovery time from a torn ACL.

Miller went on IR on December 1, 2022, and the next game he played was on October 8, 2023. That’s just 311 days for a 33-year-old to not only be expected to recover but also expected to compete. That’s outlandish.

The normal ACL recovery time is around nine months. Miller is anything but normal. He’s older than the average NFL player and he’s paid significantly more than other players at his position. From the Bills’ point of view, it’s understandable that they would want one of their huge investments on the field. From Miller’s point of view, it’s understandable that he’s mad about his lack of recovery time. 

Miller told Sports Illustrated, “It's crazy how you get injured, and you come back, and you really shouldn't have even been playing, and people judge you by a product on the field. I could have easily sat out all of last season, but I couldn't do my teammates like that. I felt like being later in my career, I didn't want to sacrifice any of my years. But at the same time, I shouldn't have been out there."

First of all, that’s reasonable. Everyone was dunking on Miller because of his lack of production in 2023, so it’s rational for him to be angry about that, especially when it was injury-related. The curious thing about this is that he mentions how he shouldn’t have been playing three times in four sentences.

Diving deep into Von Miller’s comments

It sounds like this is just another case where a world-class athlete/hyper competitor/ good teammate gets injured and has to choose between sitting by and feeling helpless or going onto the field knowing they are well below 100 percent. That’s tough. 

How much were the Bills involved in coaxing Miller into that decision? That’s the real question here. The answer is definitely more than zero. This would not be the first time a team knowingly put a player who was injured (not hurt) or not fully recovered back on the field. 

It would be very easy for the Bills to say, ‘Hey Von. You’re getting paid $20 million this year. It’d be super sick if you actually played. Also, think of your team.’ It’s totally fair if they said that, but it’s still kind of messed up.

The big kink in this whole chain is what happened this offseason when Von Miller took a mondo-sized pay cut from $20 million to $8.5 million. 

If someone persuades you to play when you know you’re not healthy, forcing you to perform as poorly as you ever have, and then follows that up by telling you that you’re going to make less than half of the money you were making, you should be legally allowed to punch them in the face.

Unless there’s a story that comes out about Von Miller socking Brandon Beane right in the mouth, it’s probably safe to assume that the pay cut was a consequence of Miller’s actions. 

That being said, based on his quotes, Von is mad at somebody. That somebody is probably all of us because we talked about how bad he was. 

Von, we’re sorry. We don’t know what we don’t know. We didn’t know the injury was hindering you as much as it was and we should have. You have to understand that we’re all mud-brained idiots. We’re sorry for saying that your deal was one of the worst deals in recent history. We’re not wrong about that one, but we’re still sorry for saying it.