FOXBORO, Mass. — After just one practice with the New England Patriots this week, Christian Barmore is prepared to make his return to the football field Sunday after sitting out the last 3 1/2 months due to blood clots.
The Patriots activated Barmore, arguably their best overall player, from the league’s non-football illness list on Saturday and he’s expected to make his season debut in a limited capacity on Sunday, according to a league source. Patriots doctors helped detect the blood clots during training camp at the end of July and Barmore sat out since.
“I know he’s excited, and he’s been wanting to get back on the field for a long time,” Patriots coach Jerod Mayo said Friday.
“A lot of credit to the doctors and the medical staff. They’ve done a great job handling the situation with Barmore. It’s tough as an athlete when you have something like blood clots because you don’t have a cast on, you don’t have a sling on or anything like that. It’s almost like that invisible ‘I feel good enough to play, I feel good enough to play’ (feeling), but there are definitely steps and procedures that we have to get through.”
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Barmore was termed a limited participant at Thursday’s practice, then didn’t participate in Friday’s practice. So it’s a quick turnaround for Barmore, who hadn’t worn pads in months, meaning his return to game action against the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday might be limited.
“Yeah, for a guy who hasn’t really put on pads since January, it’s tough,” Mayo said Friday. “You never want to just throw a guy out there coming off an injury, regardless of what the injury is, throw him out there for 50 plays. That’s unrealistic. I think we see what he can handle, and we’ll build from there.”
Barmore played 66 percent of snaps last season in a breakout campaign when he became one of the NFL’s best interior pass rushers.
That helped him cash in on a four-year, $84 million contract.
To make room for Barmore, the Patriots waived 2022 second-round pick Tyquan Thornton. The speedster out of Baylor played only 22 games with the Patriots and managed just 39 catches for 385 yards. His departure comes after he’s been a healthy scratch in recent games while the Patriots were carrying an unusually-high seven wide receivers on their 53-man roster.
It also means the team’s 2022 draft class will go down as one of their worst this century. Eight of the 10 players it drafted that year are no longer on the active roster and the other two are first-round pick Cole Strange (who has been out all season due to an injury) and third-round pick Marcus Jones.
Required reading
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(Photo: Kathryn Riley / Getty Images)
