{"id":271752,"date":"2025-08-08T13:46:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T13:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/271752\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T13:46:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T13:46:22","slug":"good-news-for-ex-saints-db-c-j-gardner-johnson-after-injury-scare-at-texans-training-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/271752\/","title":{"rendered":"Good news for ex-Saints DB C.J. Gardner-Johnson after injury scare at Texans training camp"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> training camp knee on Thursday. But the mercurial defensive back received good news; ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Gardner-Johnson’s relationship with the team that drafted him has been, well, intense. Some New Orleans Saints<\/a> 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<\/a> for an illegal hit and two taunting penalties.<\/p>\n

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That contract dispute led the Saints to trade Gardner-Johnson to the Philadelphia Eagles<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Ironically, Philadelphia never even drafted a player with that pick. They sent it to the Pittsburgh Steelers<\/a> in a package of picks for first-round draft bust Kenny Pickett, and the Steelers later swapped it with the Seattle Seahawks<\/a>. But that’s all beside the point.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Just ask the San Francisco 49ers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Saints Wire: Texans training camp: Ex-Saints DB gets good news after injury scare<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Love him or hate him, no one was happy to see C.J. Gardner-Johnson go down with a scary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076],"tags":[4191,1172,113,7,9518,253,570,3672,896,55,2572,2571,6,109,57,397,252,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-271752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-orleans-saints","8":"tag-adam-schefter","9":"tag-c-j-gardner-johnson","10":"tag-detroit-lions","11":"tag-football","12":"tag-gardner-johnson","13":"tag-houston-texans","14":"tag-kenny-pickett","15":"tag-knee-injury","16":"tag-new-orleans","17":"tag-new-orleans-saints","18":"tag-neworleans","19":"tag-neworleanssaints","20":"tag-nfl","21":"tag-philadelphia-eagles","22":"tag-pittsburgh-steelers","23":"tag-saints","24":"tag-san-francisco-49ers","25":"tag-seattle-seahawks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114993456154274022","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}