No NFL award is ever clinched prior to the games even get started. This 12 months, one particular of them currently may perhaps be.

Former Washington quarterback Joe Theismann, who experienced a job-ending damaged leg in 1985, thinks that present-day Washington quarterback Alex Smith, who endured a supposedly career-ending broken leg in 2018, by now is the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Yr for the 2020 year.

“He has gone by a whole lot more than I experienced to go as a result of,” Theismann explained to John Keim of ESPN.com. “For me it was a problem of the leg therapeutic and then hoping to do specific things needed of the quarterback posture. Alex arrived in 24 several hours of dropping his leg. I did not wind up with problems he wound up with a remarkable amount of problems. It was not just therapeutic from a damaged leg. The mountain he experienced to climb is so significantly higher.

“No subject what comes about he’s now gained the award for comeback participant of the yr.”

Theismann added that he never ever believed Smith was done.

“I was pulling for him from day a single,” Theismann claimed. “In the beginning all people reported he’ll under no circumstances engage in once more. I never acquired that. Being aware of Alex as I have appear to know him and the perseverance he experienced. . . . Now he has a possibility to go out and do sure issues.”

The most particular and specific factor he can do is gain the setting up career. Given the unconventional instances connected with the 2020 period, and in gentle of the confront that Smith was the quarterback of the 49ers immediately after the 2011 lockout and virtually led them to the Tremendous Bowl, Smith could be the right male to guide Washington’s offense.

Of program, he’d have to conquer Dwayne Haskins out for the career. And Haskins by all appearances has finished what he has to do to make the future phase in his occupation, and to satisfy the likely that created him the 15th general pick in the 2019 draft.