Inside Jadyn Glasser's journey back from knee surgery: 'I feel like it fixed me'
Glasser had surgery on a knee injury in October 2025 to address an injury that could've hindered his playing career. Now, he's back and better than he's ever been for Central Michigan.
Mt. Pleasant — It’s shortly after one of Central Michigan’s fall camp scrimmages, and on a cool August evening in Kelly/Shorts Stadium, offensive coordinator Jim Chapin came ready to quip about Jadyn Glasser’s surgically repaired knee and how it, perhaps, looks even better than it did before going under the knife 10 months ago.
“Ask him about how he’s gotten rid of his limp,” Chapin said standing next to Glasser, drawing a smile and laugh from the quarterback as the coach exaggeratedly mimicked dragging around his right leg.
It’s August 21, about two weeks before Central Michigan will open the season, 15 days until Glasser makes what will be a triumphant return to the lineup after missing most of the last year due to a knee injury and subsequent surgery and rehab.
It’s been a long road for Glasser at Central Michigan, going back to even before a knee injury cropped up after two games last season.
From navigating bursting on to the scene as a true freshman far away from home, growing up and finding some measure of self-mastery under a new coaching staff — including major strides off the field — and looking poised to be a major factor for the Chippewas starting last year, only for it to be ripped away by a knee injury that at times seemed to threaten Glasser’s chances to play meaningful football again, the third-year quarterback has crammed a decades-worth of trial and tribulation into 30 months.
And despite facing an onslaught of difficulties that could’ve broken him down, by Glasser’s own account and of those around him, he’s emerged from the last two years better than ever.
All that remains is to play football again, starting this Saturday evening with CMU opening at New Mexico, where Glasser will play as part of a quarterback duo.
“It's either going to be, like, warming up for that first game or it's going to be either a first touchdown or maybe, like, just the fans yelling out when you're running out and it's, I don't know,” Glasser said of the moment he’ll know he’s back in the thick of it. “I don't know what it's gonna be, but I can't wait for that feeling.”
A trip to Pitt, and subsequent knee issues
The general feeling around the Central Michigan program immediately after a 45-17 loss to Pitt in Week 2 last season was something along the lines of “Damn, Glasser played well.”
And he had: 7-of-9 passing with a rushing touchdown to boot as he got used amidst Central Michigan’s quarterback rotation. He helped fuel a mid-game surge that made it 24-17 at one point, though CMU never got over the hump. Glasser appeared to be emerging onto this stage, but also emerging was a right knee issue.
Glasser first started noticing some discomfort during the game, he said, but didn’t want to pull himself out of the game while playing so well. There also wasn’t any indication it wasn’t just the sort of wear-and-tear stuff that happens in football. Head coach Matt Drinkall said the initial read during the game was it might’ve been a knee contusion or something along those lines.
Then Glasser got out of bed the next morning after returning to Mt. Pleasant overnight and something felt off.
He knew something was really off when he tried to go through the Sunday workout regimen the Chippewas have and his knee started locking and giving out on him.
“I still tried to at least do the warm-up, because it didn't, like, I could walk on it fine and it didn't hurt nothing when I was walking, but as soon as I tried to get on, like, a move or get going, it just would lock up on me, basically, and just give out,” Glasser said.
Glasser then got in with Wes Sohns, CMU’s head football athletic trainer, and the rest of the training and medical staff.
“We definitely thought there was something going on inside his knee,” Sohns said. “We had everything differential from potential ligament issue to a meniscus issue, to potentially something bony.”
A standard physical screening procedure gave way to x-rays and then an MRI, which revealed some issues with the cartilage in Glasser’s knee. While it’s impossible to say definitively, it’s possible Glasser had perhaps suffered some sort of injury to it earlier in life that got shrugged off and eventually cropped back up or was re-aggravated.
Regardless, it was clear there was an issue.
“So I was like, ‘Oh, shit,' like when you get this news from Glasser, like, I was like, 'Oh, this is not great.' You know what I mean? Like this is not ideal,” Drinkall said.
And Drinkall, who had his own playing career cut short due to a cartilage issue in his ankle, immediately worried about the worst for Glasser.
“My brain, to a fault, I flipped to, ‘Man, is this guy gonna be able to like, get up and sit down when he's 36 years old?’” Drinkall said.
Sohns was ultimately more circumspect about the downside of the injury, but acknowledged it could’ve been something that permanently altered or hindered Glasser’s football ability.
And at the center of it, two weeks into his sophomore season, sat Glasser, trying to come to terms with the worst case scenario being presented.
“Not having the chance to play football again is a big deal to me, because that's all I know, is football,” Glasser said. “And it's like, if it gets taken away from me, what am I gonna be? And honestly, I'm kind of scared of that fact.”
Not being someone who will readily share with anyone, Glasser turned to his girlfriend and his dad, James. He at least needed a few people to be in the loop, to not be carrying the weight of all his fears by himself.
“She's definitely there for me during the hard times, and I’d say my dad as well,” Glasser said.
As for the prognosis, the initial thought for CMU was to see if rest could help Glasser get right and be available around the start of conference play. He travelled to the Week 3 game at Michigan, but did not dress, watching the game from the sideline in his jersey and shorts.
Weeks passed and Glasser’s knee didn’t progress. A series of injections had been discussed as a possibility, but the drastic option, surgery, came into focus.
Central Michigan’s own athletics orthopedist, Dr. Benjamin Cox, according to Sohns, farmed out the operation to the University of Michigan hospital system and Dr. John Andrew Grant.
“He felt like he doesn't see it enough to handle it,” Sohns said. “And so he talked to someone that he's worked with in the past and [head team physician] Dr. [AJ] Pinney worked with in the past and said, ‘Hey, can you, would you mind taking a look at this?’ And then that's where we went.”
Grant’s biography on the Michigan Medicine website explains that his practice focus “includes sports medicine and shoulder surgery with a focus on complex knee and cartilage/joint preservation surgery.”
Grant, who is also the head orthopedic surgeon for Eastern Michigan football and the team doc for USA Hockey’s national team development program, was apparently confident in dealing with what Glasser’s knee presented.
“It was still a significant injury, but it wasn't one where they — like, yeah, like, this is something that, this is how we fix it and it is a long rehab process, but it is something you'll get back to athletics as long as you follow our protocol,” Sohns said.
On Oct. 8, 2025, Glasser went under the knife.
And along with directly addressing the cartilage issue, the chance to look under the hood, so to speak, of Glasser’s knee gave the surgical team a chance to better understand how his physiology was, or wasn’t, working well.
The surgeons had done their part, and now the work would largely be on Glasser’s shoulders.
Long walks for a long rehab
Bacon, eggs and toast.
Simple, but that’s the meal that helped carry Glasser through his rehab, as his girlfriend would often make it for him, as well as help out around his apartment with things like laundry.
“Like she would be there with me and just making sure I'm fed and, you know, I'm not getting up and doing my laundry, hopping down the stairs and stuff like that,” Glasser said.
His dad also traveled to Michigan from Florida for the surgery and first week post-op to help out.
In the early days after the surgery, especially when he couldn’t travel with the team and tottered around on crutches, Glasser hit some of the lowest points of his rehab.
“When I got off my crutches and, like, I could finally walk again, and it was, like, 'Dang, now I want to do more,” Glasser said. “I wanna go do drops. I wanna go throw the football. I wanna go do this.' And it's like I couldn't do it. And, like, sometimes, like, even, like, away games where I can't travel with them because I have to sit in a straight leg brace, and I can't sit on the bus, like, I'm just away from everybody at home watching this game by myself.”
The Bowling Green game, 10 days after his surgery, stood out as a difficult one to watch.
But one in particular, Central Michigan’s 24-21 loss at Western Michigan on Nov. 1, stung to watch from home with a full leg brace on.
At the end of his true freshman season, Glasser got into four games for Central Michigan, including leading the Chippewas to a win over its chief rival late in 2024. Glasser wanted to be out there himself and make it so he’d be 2-0 against the Broncos.
“Western. Western was that game, for sure,” Glasser said. “I wanted to be out there so bad, because I don't like Western.”
Instead, he had to watch from afar back in Mt. Pleasant.
Andrew Graham
Andrew Graham
But if he was ever struggling himself, Glasser masked the negative emotions and proved to be a trooper through his rehab process.
“We are hypersensitive to those things, especially for someone like that,” Drinkall said. “So I think, again, testament to Wes Sohns and our staff, those guys got — and Chapin — I think those guys did a good job of having multiple touch points with him and kind of like a safety net to help him through some tough times. But not only just — every day he's shown up and been kind of the same guy, which has been just incredible. It's hard to do.”
If nothing else, Glasser was following the marker that Sohns had laid out for him.
“I talked to him about the fact that, OK, once we have a plan, you can be disappointed, down, kind of, woe is me for two days,” Sohns said. “I'll give you that. But after that two days, you've got to come in here and attack it because if you come in with a positive attitude and attack it, those rehabs go a lot smoother. You have less, less valleys and more peaks during the process.”
The quarterback eventually got back to practicing in a partial, non-contact capacity in spring. It was a nice taste, but frustrating in its own right. Being so close, Glasser wanted to be out there with his teammates fully.
And one day, when it felt on the brink of being overwhelming, Glasser did something he’s done for years now: Throw in his earbuds, turn on some music, and go for a long walk.
That specific day, he walked for about six hours, traipsing around Mt. Pleasant for much of the day since he didn’t have class. He went from their apartment in the Deerfield complex all the way to downtown and back, getting myriad texts from teammates who saw him out and about.
Other times, he’d take Jaion Jackson’s dog, a German shepherd named Creed — after Apollo Creed — for walks.
“Just being outside made me, like, just clear my mind,” Glasser said. “It was a rough day. You know, I'm seeing guys out there playing football, I wasn't playing football, and it just cleared my mind. Put a smile on my face.”
The rehab was far from a speedy process, but without any notable setbacks, Glasser began running on solid ground in June this year and got fully cleared ahead of camp.
"It was pretty heartbreaking at the beginning but I think he's definitely matured and has a different point of view towards things and realizes when you can go it's great,” James Glasser said. “He was definitely excited to get back to running and stuff. He texted me right away and said, 'I was running with the team.'"
And by the time he was running, Glasser was very ready to leave his rehab behind.
“What do you call it? What do you call those things again? I don't even want to hear the name of them — crutches,” Glasser said, as the term came to mind.
Strength in others, mastering maturity
One thing Drinkall notices about Glasser is a magnetic personality.
If you see the quarterback around campus or the facility, there’s a good chance there are a handful of teammates in tow. He’s a guy others on the team want to be around.
“One of my favorite things about him is when you walk by them in the weight room, training room, locker room, cafeteria, they always have like 6 to 8 other guys around them all the time,” Drinkall said.
And when he was mired in his knee injury, rehabbing from surgery while thousands of miles from his home and family in Florida, it was Glasser’s teammates that knew they needed to have his back.
“Everybody knows that he's from Florida, you know, all his family cannot come to help him, support him,” Jackson said of the potential for geography to isolate Glasser. “So you know, we all came together and just made sure he was straight every day, day after day.
Glasser himself tried to be as much as part of the team as he could, he said, crutching around the locker room and trying to get guys hyped up before games and practices. If someone needed someone to stand on the sideline and catch passes to warm up, he’d try to do that. Anything that made him feel like he was still of the team, part of what was going on.
Sometimes it was the rhythms off the field that helped keep that connection up.
Glasser and a few of his teammates who live in Florida — wideout Nasir Williams and then-Chippewa Josiah Booker — would make the drive together back home to Florida, piling into Glasser’s black Dodge Charger and doing five-hour shifts to break up the 15 hour drive.
The driver picks the music while, usually, the other two sleep.
“A lot of snoring, I'll tell you that,” Glasser said.
And while they were home in Florida over the offseason, Glasser and Williams spent some time together in Tampa, where Glasser is from. The two ended up riding bikes around and spending time with Glasser’s little brothers, JC and Jaxon, who are notably younger than him.
“Low expectations when you're chilling with your family. I'll be honest, they think I'm probably the funniest person alive,” Glasser said of his younger brothers. “So every time they come around, they laugh and stuff, making other people laugh and seeing them happy. I took them, I think I went on a bike ride with Nasir Williams, 'cause Nasir Williams came to my house, and, you know, we were going so fast that my little brother couldn't keep up with us. And it was just like, ‘Dang, like, like, I'm gonna look back at these times and laugh at them,’ and it's just like, you know, it's good times to have.”
James Glasser noted there might’ve been a slightly more mature streak to his eldest son as he watched him spend time with his younger brothers.
"He was home in May for three weeks and it was definitely, he was like — not that he didn't spend time with his little brothers, he has two little brothers, 7 and 11, and he stayed home a lot more and spent some time with them and they would go to the swimming pool and go swimming. They would go biking. It was a little bit different than when he was home before that."
Glasser had steadily been honing things into focus off the field since Drinkall and Co. arrived in Mt. Pleasant. He cleaned up some poor academic performance, has by all accounts been a star in the weight room and the quarterback room, and he himself said that stemmed from his brief taste of live action at the end of 2024.
“It really showed me that, like, me as a freshman, not taking it as serious as I could, like, I'm I'm out there doing this against seniors, and, you know, people that are going to the NFL and stuff like that, and it's like, ‘OK, now if I really took it serious, what could I be?’” Glasser said. “And it's like, why not just give my all to be what I can, be the best I can be? So that's how I kind of just — and then that, that didn't just translate to like the football field, too. Like,I kind of took it to everything: eating right, sleeping right, in the classroom, just all kinds of stuff.”
It all appeared to be coalescing into a strong 2025 season when Glasser’s knee gave way. But instead of beating a meek retreat, Glasser’s injury turned into a catalyst for him to exemplify how he’d gone from an uber-talented kid into a professional young man.
“I’m really proud of him for snapping back and going through all that adversity in the offseason,” Williams said.
‘I feel like it fixed me’
There’s never really been a doubt about Glasser’s bundle of physical talents. He’s big, fast, strong and can throw it a mile. But he was maybe a splash immature personally and certainly needed refinement as a football player — and even with that, he still managed to lead CMU to a win as a true freshman.
And as he’s brought his maturity and mental game along to match his physical talents, there’s a lot of optimism around the quarterback and what he can do in a shared role with named starter Angel Flores — either QB might’ve won the job outright were the other not on the roster.
“I think that he has just evolved in his appreciation of what it takes to be a great quarterback, and he understands the mental side of things,” Chapin said.
And as difficult as it might be to believe, Glasser and his teammates and coaches, to a person, will tell you that he moves better and cleaner — without a faint limp he always had — since the surgery that not only cleaned up his knee but apparently souped up his lower body.
“I feel like it fixed me and it could make me somebody who could be better than what I was before,” Glasser said. “'Cause if I played football for 20 years on a broken leg, like, what can I do on not a broken leg? You know what I'm saying? That's how I kind of go about it.”
Sohns even alluded to some measured data backing up that conclusion.
“We did notice that some of the strength numbers and certain things that we looked through from a functional movement screening aspect of things, improved through the rehab process that we have to go through, because of what we did,” Sohns said.
Glasser will debut his new-and-improved self on Saturday night as Central Michigan visits New Mexico. His knee not only works now, but works better than it ever had during the last two seasons.
And it’s a new lease on things for Glasser, having come face-to-face with the possibility of his football career being permanently hindered, or more or less done, only to turn around and find himself making it out on the other side of a rehab that surely wasn’t welcome at the time.
He’s improved physically, but perhaps more than anything he’s changed who he is as a quarterback and matured as a person over the last two-plus years, in part because there wasn’t another choice that could’ve carried him through all that’s happened.
“So I think about Jadyn Glasser, who was a kid who went from starting and winning the Western Michigan game as a freshman. to then, like, being in the mix and then having his entire season being taken away, then being told for a little bit, you might not play football, but having to battle back,” Drinkall said. “… He has been on a roller coaster, physically, injury, emotionally, and man has he just handled the whole thing with total professionalism.”
The show rolled on, and so has Jadyn Glasser.
