Dee Ford's health will be a key component to what the 49ers hope is a run back to the Super Bowl next season.
Ford, who came over from the Kansas City Chiefs in a trade last offseason, was hampered by severe knee tendinitis during his first season with the 49ers. When Ford was on the field, the 49ers' defensive line was a completely different monster. Ford battled the tendinitis all season, but underwent surgery a couple weeks after the season ended to clean up the issue.
Surgery for knee tendinitis is rare, but Dr, Michael Banffy, a team physician for the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Dodgers, told the San Francisco Chronicle's Eric Branch the 49ers and Ford should be very optimistic about his prognosis.
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“It has a very good chance to heal well,” Banffy told Branch. “I think doing the surgery for him -- something that was chronically nagging him and wasn’t responding to the modality treatments that the trainers were doing -- it was probably just a very smart idea to go ahead and definitively treat it.”
Ford has described the injury as playing with a "blown tire," but said he's progressing well in his rehab.
“I’m able to actually explode off of this knee,” Ford told 49ers media during a Zoom call late last month. “Thinking back on it, I can’t believe I played a whole season on it. And we knew at the end of the day what we had to do -- (it) had to be surgical. But I didn’t want to miss the season. We had too much going on. I didn’t want to miss that. It’s in the bag now. I’m confident in that.”
Ford missed most of training camp last season after undergoing a PRP injection in his knee. He aggravated the injury while the 49ers were practicing on an artificial surface in Youngstown, Ohio, before their Week 2 game against the Cincinnati Bengals. He also missed time late in the season with a hamstring injury that could have been a byproduct of compensating for the tendonitis.
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The severe tendinitis developed into tendinopathy, a condition that causes microtears in the tendon. That is rectified by having a surgery in which the surgeon removes the damaged part of the tendon and sews the rest of it back to the bone.
“The area of that tendon that is either removed or cleaned up or repaired is actually the same area of the tendon that we take very frequently for ACL reconstructions,” Banffy told Branch. “And people are able to recover from graft harvests for an ACL very well. I think this can be very analogous to that and even less significant than that.”
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Ford was nowhere near peak physical condition in 2019, but he still was effective. With the tendonitis cleaned up, he believes he can exceed his 2018 production when he recorded 13 sacks.
“Even though I had those hiccups going on, I felt a lot more confident, I felt a lot more powerful, I felt a lot more explosive,” Ford said. “This is crazy to say, going into Year 7, but it does slow down even more, which is scarier for me.
“I was able to see a lot more. I was a lot more confident. (I) just wasn’t able to stay out on the field. So alleviating that problem is definitely going to put me in an advantageous situation this year. I’m trying to rack up as many sacks and TFL’s (tackles for loss) as I can and help our team get back to the Super Bowl.”
If Ford is back to 100 percent, the 49ers' defensive line should once again be one of the top units in the NFL and the 49ers should be poised to head to Tampa, Fla. and avenge their Super Bowl defeat.
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