Take a good, long look at Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Todd Coffey’s elbow. Notice how it looks like a perfectly normal elbow, and not like something from your nightmares?

Coffey tweeted a picture of what his elbow looks like now, immediately following Tommy John surgery. For those of you who might not be familiar with Tommy John surgery, it’s a surgical graft procedure in which a ligament in the medial elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body and they add a bunch of braces and sew it up to look like the ass-to-mouth-end of a Human Centipede.

That picture has been included after the jump, because I don’t want you to scroll down the main page looking for Kate Upton galleries and start throwing up everywhere.

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Jharal Yow Yeh: the Brisbane Broncos player who gets injured in this video, and the noise you make when you land wrong and snap your ankle so badly that a sock is the only thing keeping us from seeing your leg guts.

The injury took place in a round 4 National Rugby League match between the Broncos and the South Sydney Rabbitohs*. I can’t provide a lot of in-depth analysis, because every time I try to do that with rugby I end up horribly wrong (examples: “That’s not rugby, that’s Australian Rules Football!” or “That’s not rugby, that’s curling!”), but I can say with confidence that the only thing grosser than an ankle shard protruding through your skin is how rugby enthusiasts on YouTube respond to jokes about it:

Yeah, the theater joke the guy made is way worse than what you said.

[h/t The Last Angry Fan]

*That’s how people in anime say “rabbit”.**
**It’s also the original name for Trix cereal.

Dwyane Wade fouled Kobe Bryant hard during the third quarter of Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game. It doesn’t look like much, but it drew blood. Kobe played the rest of the game, including that awesome part at the end where he yelled SHOOT THE F**KING BALL at LeBron and caused King James to have an acid flashback to last year’s Finals.

Turns out things were worse than a weirdly-aggressive foul and some blood. From the LA Times, who win the Michael Scott memorial “Immediately Explain Your Own Reference” award for their headline “It’s West by a nose as Kobe Bryant breaks nose”:

Bryant skipped a postgame media session after his 27-point performance, and was taken for further evaluation after he said he was “experiencing headaches.” The Lakers announced later that Bryant had suffered a nasal fracture and would be reevaluated Monday after he returned to Los Angeles by an ear, nose and throat specialist.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, Yahoo Sports is reporting that the injury is even worse.

In addition to a broken nose, Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant suffered a mild concussion in Sunday night’s NBA All-Star game, a league source told Yahoo! Sports.

We should just keep making Kobe’s injuries worse and worse throughout the year, so that if the Lakers run into the Heat in the Finals the story can be, “Kobe Bryant is getting revenge against Dwyane Wade for shattering his face, driving the bridge of his nose backwards into his brain and causing him to go into a coma and lose control of his limbs and suffer several months of debilitating rehab, and he never thought he would ever walk again but he’s here TONIGHT on the BIGGEST STAGE” or whatever.

Secondary suggestion: Kobe adopts a Phantom of the Opera style mask and Wade spends the rest of the season trying to duck him.

Injury sense ... tingling!

They’re winning games with a third string quarterback and have overcome at least 14 key injuries every week to advance to the playoffs for the first time in history, but as good as it gets, it gets just as bad. On top of everything else now, Houston Texans defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, the guy who turned the team around and taught them to work together and be a functioning professional football team, is leaving for a few weeks to take care of … uh, something.

From The Pigskin Report:

According to Fox26 reporter Mark Berman on Twitter, “Texans defensive coordinator Wade Phillips will take a medical leave of absence for a couple of weeks”.

There has been no explanation of what the reason behind the leave of absence is, but this comes as a completely unexpected move. It is being reported now that LB coach Reggie Herring will assume duties of calling the defensive coordinator during Phiilips’ absence.

Adam Schefter of ESPN is reporting that that the Texans expect Phillips to return later this season, but notes that after his performance this season there’s a chance he’ll accept a head coaching position somewhere in 2012.

The remainder of Houston’s regular season is games against Carolina, the woeful 0-13 Indianapolis Colts and the Tennessee Titans. That’s not the hardest schedule in the world and Houston has already clenched the AFC South, so I guess we shouldn’t worry too much. Or we should worry about how hard they clenched it, and how many weeks that’ll put the entire team out of action.

It’s not a good decade to be a Portland Trail Blazer apparently. First, former All-Star Brandon Roy, who was expected to simply be the team’s amnesty clause pick before he signed on elsewhere, announced that he was retiring because of his degenerative knee issues, and that sucks because he could have been great. Meanwhile, LaMarcus Aldridge will miss a few weeks after being diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which sounds cool-scary-bad at dancing. And then there’s poor, old Greg Oden.

Possibly feeling that he owed something to the team that drafted him, Oden signed a 1-year, $8.9 million deal with the Blazers, and everyone involved hoped that this would be the year that he at least cushioned the blow of that whole drafted-before-Kevin-Durant thing. Well, we’re going to have to wait a few months to find out, because he has suffered yet another setback in his own knee surgeries, hence the crutches in his recent team photo above.

And that photo has me wondering, is this the saddest thing you’ve ever seen or what? I’ve seen boxes of puppies left on the side of a road look happier than this. Poor guy, maybe he’ll finally be 100% when the Miami Heat sign him for a dollar next season.

We’ve already shared a gallery of depressing pictures from Thursday’s Browns/Steelers game and an even more depressing set about their fans, so it’s no surprise that game’s head-to-softer-head collision that concussed Browns quarterback Colt McCoy would lead somewhere depressing, no matter what side you’re on — the league has decided to celebrate James Harrison’s fifth illegal hit against a quarterback in the past three seasons by making him the first player suspended for helmet-to-helmet since the rule’s emphasis.

“We’re disappointed, we’re disappointed for James,” Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said Monday. “Because we know, quite frankly, how hard he’s worked to play within the rules. He’s worked extremely hard to adjust his game. Unfortunately, the incident did happen, it was a penalty, we have to be accountable for that. He has to be accountable for that.”

The suspension is effective immediately, but Harrison has requested an expedited hearing and they’ve set a date for his appeal. Oh, and in case you wonder how he feels about the whole thing:

I guess rolling on the floor would’ve been seen as insincere.

If you missed the hit, you can check out the video below.

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