In the fourth quarter of the 2003 Fiesta Bowl, the BCS national championship game, Willis McGahee caught a short screen pass from Ken Dorsey near the Ohio State 35-yard line and turned upfield. He was the best running back in college football, a near-certain top-five pick in the coming draft, with two thousand yards and a championship a few plays away. Then Ohio State safety Will Allen arrived. Allen drove a shoulder into the outside of McGahee's planted left leg, and the knee folded sideways into a shape knees do not make. Players in the oral history of that game described it turning into a swivel joint. McGahee went down clutching it, and a future that had looked entirely settled stopped being settled.
What the cameras could not show was how much had failed in that instant. This was not the single torn ligament most fans picture. Three of the knee's major stabilizers, the ACL, the MCL, and the PCL, ruptured at once, the severe end of the spectrum. Two days later he was on an operating table for four to five hours. Eleven days after that, still on crutches, he declared for the NFL Draft anyway.
He would be drafted in the first round while he could not yet run, then sit out his entire rookie season, and that unhurried, non-negotiable lost year is the most underrated thing in the whole story.
The hit: what a three-ligament knee injury actually is
To understand the comeback, you have to understand exactly what tore, because the diagnosis is what dictated everything that followed. A torn ACL alone, the injury people imagine when a knee buckles, is serious but well-trodden: a six-to-nine-month surgical recovery with a deep playbook behind it. McGahee did not tear one ligament. On a single hit he tore three of the four major stabilizers of the knee, and each one controls a different plane of motion. Lose all three and the joint loses its protection in nearly every direction at once.
It helps to name what each structure does, because the combination is the whole point: