‘Things are looking up.’ Chiefs’ Travis Kelce provides an update on his knee injury

Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce admitted last week was not fun.

Kelce’s knee was hyperexteded during practice on Tuesday, and he was unable to play in the Chiefs’ 21-20 loss to the Detroit Lions on Thursday.

In the latest episode of Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast, he provided an update of what happened and his outlook for Sunday’s game against the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Not fun dealing with an injury, especially that late in the week because then you for 72 hours straight are just worried about one single thing,” Kelce said. “Everybody’s asking you about it. Everybody’s in your ear about it. Everybody’s just trying to figure out ... the best scenario.

“It’s not like the organization was banking on me being back, but everybody in the organization is asking me how I’m doing so that we can go out there with the right game plan, the right mentality. And, yeah, it’s just not fun, just not a lot of sleep. And a lot of focus on a knee that wasn’t getting better fast enough.”

However, Kelce said his knee is feeling much better than at this time last week.

“Things are looking up,” he said. “I feel good. I feel a lot better than I did last week.”

Kelce added: “I did run yesterday and it feels like I might be able to play this week. We’ll see how practice goes.”

How it happened

Kelce said he felt like a jerk (well, he used another term) because he wasn’t ready to go in the season opener.

“You’ve got to be very fortunate to play this game,” Kelce said. “I take a lot of this to heart being able to be out there every single week. You’re talking about the toughness rating on Madden. I love to put that on my shoulders, on my resume, that I make myself available every single week.

“And the last practice going into the first game, I got a little lazy on some of my movement. And sure enough, (hurt) myself and couldn’t play in the first game.”

Chiefs doctors gave Kelce an X-ray and MRI to determine if he had suffered a season-ending injury.

Kelce quickly knew there was a problem.

“It immediately started swelling,” Kelce said. “And that’s the one thing with the knees or really any joint that you have, if you start swelling, muscles are starting to turn off. It’s like the body’s reaction and like kind of like safety mechanism. It just shuts off muscles.

“And so you’re going through the process of trying to communicate with the team as much as possible on where your knee is, obviously being optimistic ... about playing on Thursday. I was given as much information as I possibly could. It comes to a point where you want to be out there, but are you going to be the best player you can for the team? And is it the best option for the team for you to be out there?”

Kelce believes it was the right decision not to play against the Lions in part because he has faith in the other tight ends on the Chiefs roster.

Plus, he wanted to avoid a long-term injury.

“Couldn’t get the swelling down, which like we were mentioning right there, just the that shuts off muscles. And that’s where you really start to put yourself in even more of a risky position to go out there and maybe hurt it worse or injure yourself worse,” Kelce said. “Because the muscles aren’t firing, things like that, there’s swelling in there. So it’s a little bit easier for the knee to move around.

“You go through basically 72 hours of waking up, icing it, treatment, working out, trying to get muscles firing, just doing that over and over and over again, all while trying to communicate to the team who’s looking at you like, ‘Can you go? Can you not go?’ And it’s not a fun process.”

Jay Glazer report

Before Sunday’s games began, Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer shared a report on Kelce that proved to be accurate.

“People actually don’t know how big of a bullet they missed on Travis Kelce,” Glazer said of the Chiefs. “When it first happened, they actually thought there was a tibial plateau fracture, which is a fracture of the leg which would’ve put him out for the year. Instead, he just had a really deep bone bruise. They had to pull out 45 cc of blood.”

Kelce was surprised how accurate Glazer’s report was on Sunday.

“We got somebody leaking information,” Kelce said. “Jay Glazer’s information was oddly very on-point, which was interesting because we usually ... don’t talk about injuries or leak information about injuries. But he was saying medical terms that I was like, ‘I only heard that from the doctor.’”