Back in 2009 we PITT fans eagerly awaited Penn Hill’s linebacker Dan Mason’s field debut as a Panther and it wasn’t too long before we were able to see the extent of how he could play. Mason, a four star recruit who was on everyone’s All-Everything lists, verballed early to PITT and impressed the staff enough that he was in the two-deep at Middle Linebacker coming out of the summer training camp.
He did well that year, assuming the starting role after Adam Gunn went down with an injury. In his first start he had 11 tackles and two sacks against Navy which earned him the Big East Defensive Player of the Week. Pretty damn good start to a career, eh? Mason ended up with three starts in 2009 including the bowl game where he made a game saving interception at the goal line to preserve a win against North Carolina.
In 2010 he was the uncontested starter at Middle Linebacker and played in three games before his dramatic and very serious knee injury, sustained when he was tackling a Miami player after a pass reception. That is a gruesome injury and he found out afterward that it was much more than a common MCL/ACL injury as he had thought. Reflecting back on how it happened Mason said this:
“I think about it ’cause I was so stupid just,” Mason says with a smile. “I love getting contact so as he was going down I wanted to give him an extra shot, and I guess I blinked or something and he went lower than I thought he was gonna go. He took out my knee.”
Mason initially didn’t know the damage that had been done. He thought he had torn his ACL. If only. “I rolled over and I looked down and saw my knee poking out. I was like ‘Oh man. I saw some of my teammates running the other way grossed out and everything. [The bone] wasn’t poking out of my skin, but you could see the form of the bone poking out. It didn’t break the skin.”
Ugh. It was bad then and the news would get worse. Not only was his knee almost literally destroyed in being dislocated along with shredded ligaments but he also had serious nerve damage which resulted in “Foot Drop”, which sounds harmless enough but is a condition in which the person can’t flex the ankle into an upward position which leads to the foot staying at a downward angle and dragging along the floor. Try waking with that let alone attempting to play ball again.
