How long could the Seahawks be without Jadeveon Clowney?

Sunday the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 17-9 in a low-scoring game that saw plenty of both offenses underperforming, aided in their inability to score by the cold and the wind. The Hawks defense held the sputtering Eagles to just 9 points, the first time this season, and just the third time since the start of the 2018 season, that the defense has held an opponent to single digits. Extra encouraging was the fact that the group did so without the services of Jadeveon Clowney, who was inactive due to a hip injury.

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Its’ an injury he apparently suffered in the Week 10 win over the San Francisco 49ers, and which kept him from participating in any of the team’s practices last week. We were told last week that he was away from the team to seek treatment, and the extent of that became clear yesterday when it was reported where he sought treatment and which doctor he visited.

As Ian Rapoport reported, Clowney was in Philadelphia in order to be evaluated by Dr. William Meyers, who is indeed a specialist. Unfortunately for Seahawks fans, his specialty is the repair of core muscle injuries, including injuries that affect the hip socket. From his website,

Treating patients with abdominal or groin injuries stemmed from his unique experiences in the 1980s with the U.S. National Soccer Team, Miami Dolphins, and various Olympic athletes. Since then, he has developed a number of variants of the surgical repair for core muscle injuries and their relationship to the ball and socket hip joint. He has evaluated more than 15,000 patients, including professional players from the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and MLS, as well Olympic track and field athletes, professional tennis players, golfers and bull riders, as well as collegiate and recreational athletes.

That’s a whole lot of wording to basically say something very simple: Dr. Meyers specializes in the treatment of sports hernias. Further, he’s no stranger to members of the Seahawks, as just this year he has performed the surgeries to repair the sports hernias of both Jarran Reed and Doug Baldwin.

In short, based on the information that is available to us, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to guess that Clowney likely has a sports hernia, and he might need surgery. If that proves to be the case, even a best case scenario likely has Clowney missing a month, if not more. Hopefully that’s not the case, but it seems odd to send a player to see one of the world’s foremost authorities on sports hernia operations unless that player needs an operation on a sports hernia.

Luckily the Seahawks are sitting fairly pretty at 9-2 right now, but with a schedule that is not exactly kind to the Hawks down the stretch, they’ll need all the help they can get in the pass rush department.