Texans safety Ed Reed still isn’t sure when he’s going to be able to get on the field with his new teammates, but he was much more certain about one aspect of his hip injury on Tuesday.
There have been some questions about whether or not the Texans were aware of the severity of his injury when they signed Reed, but Reed said Tuesday that there was no talk of surgery until after he joined the Texans. While there were reports that the Ravens knew Reed’s hip was troublesome, Reed said an MRI was done on the hip after he experienced discomfort while working out in Houston and coach Gary Kubiak also said that “obviously” the Texans didn’t know there was a possibility that Reed’s debut with the team would be delayed by a torn labrum before signing him.
With that out of the way, Reed moved on to talk about when the injury occurred. He doesn’t know for certain, but suggested that a kick delivered by Patriots quarterback Tom Brady could be to blame.
“Only play I can look at is when I got kicked by a certain quarterback but even then I played in the Super Bowl and you saw what happened there,” Reed said, via Tania Ganguli of the Houston Chronicle. “Even then I had two MCL sprains, a second degree one in the left in the Super Bowl in the first quarter and played through that. So if you’ve got any questions about my heart and how I play and how I work.”
Brady was fined $10,000 for the kick, which came as Brady was sliding down late in the first half of the AFC Championship Game, and Reed, as he mentioned, went on to play two weeks later. Whether or not that rules out the possibility of the kick being the culprit is unknown, but it also probably doesn’t matter all that much to the Texans.
They signed Reed to be a leader on their defense and in the secondary, something that they’d like to see happen sooner rather than later regardless of why Reed needed to have an operation.
