Jermichael Finley’s Surgery Didn’t Work

You may have heard. Former Green Bay Packers tight end Jermichael Finley formally retired this week, even though we all assumed he had already quietly retired.

Finley suffered a neck injury during the 2013 season and hasn’t played since. It turns out, there’s good reason for that. It wasn’t just that Finley turned down several contract offers — as he suggested — or that no team wanted to take the chance after he had spinal fusion surgery — as we suspected.

It’s that the surgery never fully corrected the injury.

Rob Demovsky reports the vertebrae never fully fused and the bruise he had never fully went away.

“The bruise got smaller, but the fusion hadn’t connected,” Finley said. “They said if the bruise goes away completely, you can come back if it still hasn’t fused. And I was cool with that. Let’s try to get this bruise gone, but the bruise never went away. so I was like, there’s no reason to come back, plus I had nerve damage in my entire upper body.”

So there you have it.

That now calls into question whether there ever were any contract offers for Finley in the summer of 2014.

Not that that’s important.

We just have our doubts that any team, especially the Green Bay Packers, would be interested in a player with a neck injury that won’t heal.