Finally, some news on Casto - unfortunately, it's not as good as hoped for

Vince Grippi is reporting tonight that DeAngelo Casto finally had arthroscopic surgery on the knee he injured while playing with Team USA in the FIBA U19 tournament in New Zealand, and while the prognosis isn't terrible, it's not as good as we all hoped for.

Back when the news broke of the injury, I noted that the extent of these kinds of injuries often isn't known until the doctor gets inside the knee to repair it. It looks like that's exactly what happened this time, as the original reported timetable of a 6- to 8-week recovery now has been stretched out to 10 to 12 weeks thanks to the surgeon having to repair two tears -- in both the lateral and medial menisci -- rather than just one tear.

If you're a geek like me and wondering just what that means, here's the picture of the knee I ran in the previous post. The meniscus is the cushion between the bones in the knee joint:

via img.webmd.com

The words lateral and medial identify which side of the knee the meniscus is on, meaning Casto had tears on both sides of his knee:

via img.webmd.com

The good news is that these types of knee injuries don't typically stay with athletes or rob them of any of their quickness or agility. And as long as everything goes smoothly in his rehab -- and these sorts of surgeries have become rather routine for athletes and their physicians, so there's no reason to think it won't -- the 10- to 12-week timetable puts him ready to begin full-scale workouts somewhere around the end of September or middle of October, which is in plenty of time for the start of practices.

While this does suck as far as Casto working on strength training and offseason conditioning, this could be a huge blessing in disguise. If I remember correctly, Casto battled through some knee soreness during the season, which means there's a good chance that one or more of these tears had already begun. Much better to get them repaired now than once the season has already started.

There are some other links to pass along tonight that I didn't have time to post today, if you're so inclined to read them:

• WSU Football Blog breaks down the offensive line. I maintain that these guys hold the keys to our offensive effectiveness.
• Howie Stalwick checks in with Taylor Rochestie, who appears to be parlaying his pretty good showing in the NBA Summer League into a contract with a German basketball team.
• Jim Moore finally writes another Cougfan.com column, getting inside the head of punter Reid Forrest.
• Jon Wilner continues his best of the decade series and names Jason Gesser the seventh-best Pac-10 QB since the turn of the century. When you look at the other names on that list, you realize just how many good quarterbacks have come through this conference in the last 10 years. Holy cow.