Love him or hate him, no one was happy to see C.J. Gardner-Johnson go down with a scary knee injury at Houston Texans training camp knee on Thursday. But the mercurial defensive back received good news; ESPN's Adam Schefter reported that initial tests found he did not tear his ACL, as was feared. It'll take more exams to learn the extent of the damage, but his season isn't over.
Gardner-Johnson's relationship with the team that drafted him has been, well, intense. Some New Orleans Saints fans empathized with him and his push for a top-dollar contract. Others were happy to see him go. When Gardner-Johnson returned to the Caesars Superdome last season, he lost half his game check in fines for an illegal hit and two taunting penalties.
That contract dispute led the Saints to trade Gardner-Johnson to the Philadelphia Eagles on Aug. 30, 2022, in exchange for a couple of draft picks, with another selection going with him to Philly. In the time between that trade and the Eagles getting to spend that seventh-round pick in 2025 they got from New Orleans, Gardner-Johnson lost a Super Bowl with Philadelphia, signed with the Detroit Lions in free agency, suffered a different knee injury and recovered from it, and then was re-signed by the Eagles. There he finally won a Super Bowl title, only to be traded to Houston on March 11, 2025, more than a month before this year's draft.
Ironically, Philadelphia never even drafted a player with that pick. They sent it to the Pittsburgh Steelers in a package of picks for first-round draft bust Kenny Pickett, and the Steelers later swapped it with the Seattle Seahawks. But that's all beside the point.
It's good that Gardner-Johnson dodged a season-ending injury there. Now we can all take a sigh of relief. Longtime Saints fans probably won't be surprised that this all happened at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, where their team limped through a lot of injuries and bad luck between some mediocre 7-9 seasons in the mid-2010's. After all, that place is cursed. Just ask the San Francisco 49ers.