When the news broke that the Eagles would be bringing back Jeremiah Trotter, the reasons to be skeptical were obvious. He's been out of football for 2 years, his knees were shot, and he couldn't move effectively. To his credit, Andy Reid addressed all of those concerns quite specifically in his press conference this week when he was asked why he was comfortable bringing back Trot.
"I go right to his knee," Reid said. "I wanted that looked at, observed by our doctors. He had it cleaned out and before he left here he had a lot of swelling. He couldn’t straighten his leg and therefore his quads went, his glutes went and he wasn’t able to explode like he had been in the past. He had told me that the swelling had gone down; he had been working on it and the swelling hadn’t come back. But again, he wasn’t doing football. I thought it was important to bring him in here and see where he was at. We hammered him pretty good and the swelling stayed out of the knee, his change of direction was better where he couldn’t do that before, to where I thought he could help us. It looked like it was back and throughout the whole week the swelling stayed out of there and there were no signs of him not being able to fire his quad and extend his knee. We’ll see. We’ll take it week by week here and see how he does."
I'm still very skeptical, but I am encouraged by what Andy had to say here. It seems that he knew exactly why Trotter ceased to be effective a few years ago and appears satisfied that those issues are fixed.