Chiefs HC Andy Reid, Rick Burkholder explain that WR Hollywood Brown's injury is uncharted territory

The Kansas City Chiefs are facing some uncharted territory regarding WR Hollywood Brown's injury, surgery, and recovery timeline .

Shortly after news broke that Brown would need surgery on his sternoclavicular joint injury, Rick Burkholder took us through everything leading up to this moment. Yes, the Chiefs have seen this injury before when former WR Tyreek Hill suffered the same ailment back in 2019 . What they hadn't seen before was a situation where the injury did not heal properly.

"As far as Hollywood (Brown) goes, he was hurt on August the 10th, and he had an injury that we've seen before," Rick Burkholder told reporters. "It was reduced, not surgically reduced, but reduced in Jacksonville. And the protocol is that you look at that again in a week to make sure it's still in place. And it was and then he was doing great in rehab. He was having no pain. We were discussing return-to-play opportunities, but we had one last check of another image to do at three weeks from four weeks from the injury, three weeks from the last MRI, and it looked like the bone had moved. So we consulted with three or four physicians in the country and then sent them out the veil to a specialist. And everybody involved felt like it was a little too risky for him to play without having this operated on. So, he's been fixed, or he'll be fixed on Monday in Vail, Colorado, and then we'll go from there. There's obviously no timelines, because we don't, we don't know yet."

Ultimately, the Chiefs took all the necessary steps, but the outcome of the healing process wasn't what they'd hoped. There is at least some reason for optimism here. According to David Chao ( aka @ProFootballDoc on X ), if Brown undergoes a procedure to relocate the SC joint, it's possible that he could return this season. If surgery to repair or reconstruct the SC joint is needed, he'll likely be out for the year.

The Chiefs aren't putting any sort of timeline on his injury return because this is simply a scenario that no other NFL player has encountered.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with Hollywood (Brown)," Chiefs HC Andy Reid said. "He's a great kid. Well, I'll tell you, and nobody wanted to do this more than he did, so our hearts go out to him, but he'll be he'll get himself back and ready to go down the road here, whenever that time is. We don't know exactly how long that'll be, but it does take a pretty extended amount of time to take place."

The team is not holding any illusions. They know that either way, it'll be a long recovery process for Brown. Just as they did with the process leading up to his surgery, they'll take the necessary steps to ensure that he's able to get healthy and eventually make a return to the football field.

"Everybody's a little different, and this thing, they're not a lot of these (injuries) that we have information on," Reid explained. "So we've just got to, we just got to ride it out and see how long it takes. It's not going to be weeks, more like months, and so we'll see where that takes us in this process. But that's the information we have. But we're just gonna have to, like, hold tight on that."

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