In due time, Broncos staffers might need to scratch out P.J. Locke’s height from his roster information. He was 5-foot-10 in 2024, and was the year before that, and has been every single year he’s worn a uniform in Denver since his rookie year in 2020.
Locke is now 5-foot-11. The safety also underwent one of the most intense procedures a football player can have in the offseason — a spinal-fusion surgery he casually revealed at the start of July in a YouTube video. Somehow, as fellow Denver safety Brandon Jones affirmed Saturday, the man has grown an inch since he went under the knife.
How on Earth is that possible?
“I’m like, ‘Man,'” Jones cracked, “‘I might need to get that.'”
In reality, the height boost is no medical miracle. It’s actually quite common, as Dr. Neel Anand explained. The technique of fusion involves inserting a “spacer” into a collapsed disc, which can both lengthen and realign the spine. Presto. Receivers will now stare across the line at a safety who’s gone through medical puberty.
“It’s a really good, added benefit,” chuckled Anand, the director of the Spine Center at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
This surgery, though, was a miracle in it of itself, if you ask Locke. In a different time, his career could’ve easily been over. Anand knows Locke’s surgeon, Dr. Chad Prusmack, who has long served as a neurological consultant for the Denver Broncos. Anand knows Locke’s case, because the spinal community is small. And Anand thereby knows Locke, who came into Prusmack’s office Jan. 13 for an MRI after a season of quiet pain, “absolutely needed” spinal-fusion surgery.
As Denver’s training camp has kicked off this week, Locke is back and backpedaling through team periods without any sign of a slip. Roughly six months since Prusmack repaired his spine. That’s in large part a credit to how Locke’s attacked rehab, Anand affirmed. He’s a grinder who’s grown from an undrafted free agent with barren pockets to a crucial part of Denver’s secondary.
But Locke’s recovery is also the result of a medical advancement that Anand wants to show the public: That spinal fusion does not require as brutal a rehabilitation as previously thought.
“He’s really done very well during that process, and … it’s a taboo that’s out there that you can’t come back from spinal fusion,” Anand said. “I disagree.”
When Locke published the YouTube video earlier this month that tracked his last few months rehabbing from that spinal surgery, his own channel expressed some doubt at his potential return. There were “no guarantees that PJ would return to play football ever again,” the video’s description reads. And the term “spinal fusion” naturally sounds a blaring alarm at any athlete’s chances of recapturing full previous mobility.
Take it from the Detroit Lions’ Levi Onwuzurike, who laid out his return from a spinal-fusion procedure in a first-person essay a couple of years ago.
“There are not a lot of guys who get this surgery and are able to come back to football,” Onwuzurike wrote. “I had coaches tell me they had friends get this exact surgery and not be able to return to the game.”
But across the last 20 years, surgeons have become more conscious of how to conserve spinal angulation and natural motion, as California neurosurgeon Dr. Jason Liauw said. Today, Anand explained, all spinal surgery is done with minimal invasiveness. Previously, surgeons would have to strip a patient’s surrounding muscles to correct any herniation or fracture in the spine.
That would’ve been a “game-changer” for Locke, Anand said. Instead, in modern times, the Broncos safety was able to begin sequential rehab just a few weeks after the procedure.
“Elite athletes are completely different beasts than compared to the regular, the normal person getting a spinal fusion,” Liauw said. “Athletes have a lot of muscular support and ligamentous support … a lot of times, they can actually recover because they have so much, like, supportive structure around their spine.”
Locke is now healthy, as Broncos head coach Sean Payton put it simply this week. And Jones, who called Locke “one of the hardest workers I know,” gushed over his former Texas teammate’s progress.
“Being, like, one of the only people that has dealt with this type of injury before, and the way he’s come back, the way he’s looked – I’m super, super impressed,” Jones said. “I tell him every day how good he looks. His feet, his speed, everything. It looks like he hasn’t lost a step at all.”
After evolving from a practice-squad dangler to special-teams safety to an irreplaceable piece of Denver’s secondary in 2024, the Broncos need Locke to contribute again this season. Free-agent signee Talanoa Hufanga, who will likely take Locke’s starting spot, has played a total of 17 games over the past two seasons and plays an all-out style that lends itself to injuries. There’s also little proven depth in the room behind Locke.
The only real concern in recovery, Liauw said, was to keep a strong core to not put as much stress on individual levels of the spine. But the risk of injury, Anand said, won’t be any different for Locke than it is for anyone else in a Broncos uniform.
“Is this unexpected?” Anand said of Locke’s recovery. “No, no, no … I expect him to play.
“And I expect him to do well.”
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