An NFL team doctor has issued a chilling warning for the future generation of America’s sporting stars as he claimed an injury epidemic could end their careers before they even have chance to begin.
In January, Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix fractured his ankle during the winning drive of a 33-30 overtime victory over the Buffalo Bills. It derailed his postseason and shattered the Broncos’ Super Bowl hopes.
Four months later, Dr Karim Meijer, the head physician for the Broncos, had to tell another patient that their season was over, too.
The difference? It was an elbow injury rather than a lower limb issue, and a baseball player rather than a football star. Crucially – and more strikingly – this patient was not a professional athlete, he was a 13-year-old boy.
‘He’s done,’ Meijer told the Daily Mail in between surgeries at CommonSpirit Health in Colorado. ‘He’s going to be out for probably four to six months.’
And the youngster is not the only one. America’s next generation of sporting heroes are being plagued by an epidemic.
Denver Broncos quarterback Bo Nix walks off the field during a 2026 playoff game where he fractured his ankle
Dr Karim Meijer serves as the head physician for the Denver Broncos
Across the nation, America’s youth are aspiring to be the next Patrick Mahomes, LeBron James and Shohei Ohtani. Instead, they are landing on the operating table with adult-sized injuries such as ACL tears and Tommy John surgeries as young as ten years old.
‘It’s a pretty devastating kind of thing,’ said Meijer, who previously worked with the New Orleans Saints.
‘We’re seeing more adult injuries in kids now. You’re seeing kids as young as ten, 12 years old getting ACL injuries because they’re playing year-round sports.’
He is seeing children pass through his operating room with complete ACL tears. One, he said, had already torn the ligament twice before the age of 13.
Meanwhile, another teenager came to his clinic after pulling the growth plate off the inside of his elbow – a result of year-round baseball.
In his ‘jumping athletes’ – such as basketball and volleyball players – he’s seeing patellar tendon issues and quad tendon issues to the ‘extent that you would see in adults.’
‘I’ll see really high grade patellar tendon and quad tendon problems in teenagers that you typically would have seen in a ten-year professional athlete veteran,’ he explained.
Children are being pushed into grueling 25-hour weekly training sessions across school and club teams. Many are dedicating almost every waking hour outside of school to one specific sport in the hope that it will be their golden ticket to the pros.
Their parents spur them on, pushing them further down one path in the belief that year-round specialization secures college scholarships.
Meijer and his mentor Dr James Andrews on the field at a New Orleans Saints game
A young Meijer celebrates a University of Texas victory as a player himself
Instead, it is causing permanent physical damage before high school even begins.
Meijer warned that if a child specializes in just one sport before the age of 13, they have a ’70 percent chance that they’re not playing any sports’ at all in the future.
‘If you specialize in something, the odds are against you,’ he said.
‘Parents can at least put them into multiple sports, so they don’t burn a kid out and don’t mentally exhaust a kid from doing the same thing over and over again.
‘The farmers had it right. The farmers rotate crops, so you rotate the crops. If you just try and grow the same crop on the same field every year, you burn out the nutrients of the soil. So, you rotate the crops. So, the concept is to rotate sports.’
Meijer also pointed to the capitalization and commercialization of youth sports. Youth mini leagues have become businesses that have switched from seasonal activities to year-round organizations in order to profit, giving budding athletes no time to rest.
But parents who want to see their kids become professional athletes should start thinking like them. That means following a traditional athletic program – taking an offseason before immediately launching into the next league cycle.
Children play foodball in Ferguson, Missouri. Meijer claimed that the next generation of sports stars are being plagued by an injury epidemic
A Little League baseball coach talks to his players in Norwalk, Connecticut. Meijer claimed children as young as ten years old are landing on the operating table with sports-related injuries
‘The high school kids train hard, but they don’t recover hard,’ Meijer said. ‘They don’t take care of their bodies the same way the pros invest in taking care of their health.
‘It’s okay to say no, and just take a break. Take a break from sports, both physically and mentally, so you can still stay engaged.’
While Meijer, who is a parent to three children of his own, stressed that it was his key piece of advice to parents, scaling back may be difficult for many to comprehend – especially as colleges begin to come calling earlier.
The demands of college sports are ever increasing in the new era of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals with children pressured to prove themselves at a younger age.
‘These college kids are getting paid, and some of these high school kids are getting paid as NIL deals to go to college,’ Meijer explained. ‘There’s definitely more money, so the pressure has increased.
‘You even see parents running social media accounts for their children to promote them as youth athletes. It’s kind of wild, you know? It’s a unique world we live in.’
But no college – and certainly no professional team – will recruit a player who has spent their youth sidelined, riddled with injury.
‘An old adage in sports medicine is: availability is the best ability. If you’re not available, it really doesn’t matter,’ he insisted.
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Meijer (number 3) was a member of the Longhorns’ 2005 National Championship team
It’s an maxim Meijer can attest to. He played defensive back for the University of Texas on the Longhorns’ 2005 National Championship team.
After graduating from UT, he attended medical school, completing his fellowship under Dr James Andrews – the man responsible for reconstructing legendary quarterback Drew Brees’s shoulder.
It was Andrews who recommended Meijer to the New Orleans Saints and then-head coach Sean Payton. Meijer reunited with Payton in Denver last year.
During his tenures with two NFL teams, Meijer has attended multiple NFL Combines ahead of Drafts, holding the responsibility to evaluate every prospect and create a medical risk profile for each one.
‘I’ve taken care of two professional NFL teams,’ he said. ‘People always ask me, who are they going to draft? I don’t know who we’re drafting, I know who we’re not drafting.
‘We don’t have a crystal ball, but we can use our experience, we can use data and medical literature.’
He relays his evaluation of each athlete’s medical history to the teams, likening it to ‘evaluating a business.’ After all, what is medically healthy is financially healthy.
He’s seen entire careers derailed. Injuries, especially cartilage issues, have limited or even ended careers with players’ draft stock plummeting over the lingering ghosts of health fears – ‘It turned into a multi-, multi-million-dollar issue for that athlete.’
Drew Brees waves to the crowd during a 2025 football game. Andrews was responsible for the reconstruction surgery on Brees’s shoulder
‘It’s even already happening in the collegiate world now, and the collegiate world is trickling to the high school world.’
One of Meijer’s past patients signed a college volleyball scholarship, only for the school to attempt to make it conditional on her ACL recovery, threatening to rescind the offer if she tore the ligament in her other knee.
Yet, even those athletes who make it through the draft unscathed can’t avoid the plague forever.
High-profile NBA superstars Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton both ruptured their Achilles last season. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Mahomes’ 2025 NFL season came to a devastating end when he tore his ACL and LCL in December.
The Broncos’ signal caller Nix followed suit just over a month later when he suffered his ankle fracture in the divisional round of the AFC playoffs. The quarterback had several ankle operations dating back to high school, including one following his rookie season.
Meijer believes that may be the common thread. He suggested that the current generation of sporting superstars may, in fact, be patient zero of the injury epidemic rocking the nation’s youth.
‘There are injuries now that we’re seeing at the pro level, that, if you dig into it a little bit, probably started at the youth level, because of the amount of mileage these athletes are putting on their bodies before they get to the professional rank or even the collegiate ranks,’ he said. ‘The mileage just catches up.
Boston Celtics superstar Jayson Tatum is helped off the court after he ruptured his Achilles during last year’s NBA playoffs
Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes falls to the ground during a 2025 game. He tore his ACL and LCL in December
‘Healthy tendons don’t just rupture. Every one of those Achilles tendons and patellar tendon ruptures, things of that nature, that tendon is diseased – it’s been compromised.’
Yet, while Tatum returned to the court for the Boston Celtics just ten months after his rupture, and Mahomes is already eyeing a comeback for the 2026 NFL season, the path back may not be as smooth for pre-pubescent athletes.
Adult injuries in children don’t necessarily mean adult treatment. Medics have to turn to altered practices to operate on children and their developing bodies, meaning the young athletes can’t receive ‘the gold standard.’
‘There are some considerations you have to make in youth kids because of the growth points,’ Meijer said. ‘It does change what you do.’
