Texans WR Harry Williams Carted Off Field With Neck Injury, Has Regained Movement

Texans wide receiver Harry Williams was having a great camp, and had a chance of making the team based on his special teams play. Those dreams were likely ended yesterday, when Williams suffered a neck fracture while trying to make a special team tackle in the the first quarter of the Texans-Cowboys preseason game.

Williams was paralyzed on the field, but regained feeling and movement while being transported by ambulance to the hospital. The fracture is of the C3 vertebra, and he will be have surgery in Dallas this weekend to fuse his spine. Team orthopedic specialist Dr. Walter Lowe and coach Gary Kubiak discusses the injury in more depth in the above HoustonTexans.com video. They believe his prognosis is good.

Right tackle, Eric Winston in a post game interview discussing Williams wondered whether the league can do anything about these sorts of injuries that occur during special team plays:

Guys are getting bigger, stronger, faster. You have offensive linemen and defensive linemen that are 6-6, 330 going against guys that run 4.5 [in the 40-yard dash]. It's tough to take.

He was likely thinking of Texans DT Cedric Killings who went down with a similar injury during a special teams play.

The Texans defense played awful after the injury, and DE ND Kalu suggested it took them a while to get their heads back into the game:

I think when we recovered is when we started hearing rumors that he was moving and that he was OK. Because as much as we wanted to win this game, everybody loves Harry, loves his work ethic, (he's) just a good person. And it puts everything in perspective when one of your guys is down and you're looking for his feet to move, his hands to move. It was eerily similar to when Cedric Killings went down last year. It's hard to get up after one of your teammates goes down and you don't know what's wrong with him.

Williams as he was carted off the field asked Kubiak for the team to get him a win, but they fell short. The Texans lost to the Cowboys, 23-22.

If you would like to send good wishes to Harry Williams, you can send them to this address:

Harry Williams
The Houston Texans
Two Reliant Park
Houston, TX 77054