And the misery of the South Carolina game refuses to end. In his noon press conference today, Nick Saban confirmed that Julio Jones has a broken hand and underwent surgery to insert screws and a plate. According to Saban, Julio injured the hand in the first half against South Carolina and played through it. And no, you are not tough.
In terms of the time he would miss, Saban would give no set timetables. Apparently it is going to be an issue of pain tolerance, and his time out could be a few days or a couple of weeks. The good news is that Saban made no mention of this likely being a long-term injury, and you have to feel that he could probably return for the LSU game after the bye week.
Obviously, this is bad news for Alabama. At a time when we need the offense to be a juggernaut, losing our best receiver only makes being that all the more difficult. We do not have anyone who can legitimately replace Julio, and the overall depth of the wide receiver rotation is now in serious question. We've rotated several players at wide receiver this year, but despite that rotation we have not thrown the ball in their direction very often, so in many ways those players are still unproven commodities. Making matters even worse, Julio is probably the best run blocker in the country at the wide receiver position, and that all goes away with this too.
Hopefully the rest of the team can step up and make his potential absence a non-issue until we make the trek to Baton Rouge.