Alex Smith suffered a gruesome leg injury while being sacked in Nov. 18, 2018 game against the Houston Texans. The Washington Redskins quarterback endured emergency surgery to hopes of repairing his compound fracture that broke his fibula and tibia.
In an interview with ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap during an episode of “Outside the Lines,” Smith revealed scary details following his leg injury that made him “very much lucky to be alive.”
Smith developed sepsis, a potential life-threatening infection, that presented him the choice of having his injured leg amputated to save his life.
“[N]ext thing I remember is waking up several weeks later faced with the decision of amputation or limb salvage at that point,” Smith told Schaap.
Smith opted to save his life and endured a multitude of additional surgeries, as doctors attempted to salvage his leg. He would wear an external fixator for eight months.
Smith now wants to overcome the challenges he faced by returning back to the football field.
“There’s enough there that I can go out there and play … Knowing that, yeah, failure is a possibility … I need to prove that I can come back and play quarterback in the NFL, and if I can do that, that would be great and it’ll get figured out,” Smith added.
Smith is set to make $16 million in 2020 with a $21.4 million cap hit.
Needing a quarterback the Redskins drafted Dwayne Haskins in the first round of the 2019 NFL Draft. While he appears to be the QB of the future for the franchise, recently-hired head coach Ron Rivera previously stated he doesn’t want to forget about Alex Smith if he is healthy for next season.
