COLTS

He nearly lost a leg; now he's trying to make the Colts roster

Zak Keefer
zak.keefer@indystar.com

Note: Tyler Varga made the cut to the 53-man Colts roster on Sept. 5, though the final roster is subject to additional moves.

He owns an evolutionary biology degree from Yale and hopes to one day become an orthopedic surgeon … yet Tyler Varga has spent the last three months in an extended stay hotel, half his bags still packed, loaded in the trunk, ready in case the call comes.

Colts running back Tyler Varga makes a catch as the team opens NFL football training camp in Anderson, Ind., Aug. 2, 2015.

"I'm kinda living out of my car, to be honest," he says.

He's a 5-11, 225-pound package of pure muscle, the son of bodybuilders (no surprise there) with the balance of a former gymnast (because he is) and the power to pinball off linebackers and burrow into the end zone … yet he could be out of work by Saturday.

"My job's been on the line every single day since I got here," he says.

He's an on-the-bubble undrafted running back scraping for his NFL existence, maybe the 53rd man on the Indianapolis Colts' soon-to-be-decided 53-man roster, maybe the 54th. He's a day away from the biggest job audition of his life, the Colts' preseason finale against Cincinnati, a game that's utterly meaningless … unless your name is Tyler Varga. To him this game means everything.

Yet ask him about it, and he smiles, refusing to let the angst of the situation overwhelm. Nerves? Nah. He's faced worse. He's overcome worse.

Four years ago he almost lost one of his legs.

Varga was never supposed to play college football, never supposed to be sitting in an NFL locker room having survived first cuts and sweating the final ones. In the days that followed a punishing hit he absorbed in his final game as a high school football player, in November 2010, doctors told him there was a chance he'd never walk normally again. Forget football; he couldn't feel anything below his knee for four months.

"Imagine the worst cramp you've ever had," he explains. "It's kind of like that, but 1,000 times worse. And it never goes away, no matter what you do. It felt like my leg was getting ripped apart from the inside out."

Tyler Varga (38) rounds the corner and eyes the end zone for a touchdown in the second half Aug. 29, 2015, at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis.

So what happened? Varga, then a senior for Cameron Heights Collegiate in Kitchener, Ontario, had torn his peroneal tendon, the band of tissue that connects the calf muscle to the foot. But that was just the start. Soon he was suffering from acute compartment syndrome. Problem was: His doctors didn't know it.

The collision had set off bleeding and swelling inside the muscle compartment of Varga's lower leg — he won't say which one — and without surgery within the first 24 hours, the pain intensifies. Greatly. That's what went wrong for Varga.

Initially doctors pumped him with morphine, figuring it was only a bruise. But the fluid continued to build and the leg continued to swell. The day after the game, he woke up and his calf was the size of his quad.

The proper procedure consists of a surgeon relieving the pressure by cutting into the muscle, akin to letting the air out of a balloon. It has salvaged the careers of NFL players like Rahim Moore and Hakeem Nicks. But Varga never had the surgery. The doctors didn't operate because they didn't realize it was compartment syndrome for three days. All the while, he lay in the hospital bed, writhing in pain. By then the threat of gangrene worried them.

"Amputation was a possibility," Varga says now, shaking his head.

All he could do was wait. He finally saw a neurologist, who urged patience. There was no muscular function, no sensory function, for months on end. He couldn't feel his foot or wiggle his toes. College football wasa far-off fantasy. The NFL? No way. Not a chance.

Colts fullback Tyler Varga, right, spikes the ball after scoring on a 1-yard run, Aug. 29, 2015, in St. Louis.

Then, in March — four months after the hit that sent him to the hospital in the first place — he saw a sliver of progress. He saw the tendon in his foot flex.

"Then, I started with my big toe," he remembers, his voice rising. "A small, little wiggle. You could barely see it. It was one of the happiest days of my life."

The nerves were regenerating, revitalizing. His leg was coming back to life.

From there he went from a walking boot to an ankle brace to tennis shoes to track spikes, slowly, gradually regaining and rebuilding his strength and coordination. By May, six months after the collision that nearly cost him his lower leg, he was running the 100-meter dash for the Cameron Heights track team. By August he was playing in his first college football game, for the University of Western Ontario, and scoring three touchdowns. By season's end he was the team's MVP, conference player of the year and headed to Yale.

And he did it, in his words, by becoming the first patient ever to recover from compartment syndrome without undergoing surgery.

Wait a minute. Ever?

"Ever," Varga says. "There's no medical documentation of anybody recovering from the acute compartment syndrome that I had, at the stage of severity that I had."

Tyler Varga #30 of the Yale Bulldogs reaches for a touchdown past Norman Hayes #7 of the Harvard Crimson during their 131st meeting on November 22, 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts.

In three seasons at Yale he amassed 2,985 yards and 31 touchdowns. He graduated last spring, 3.5 GPA in tow, with that degree in evolutionary biology and dreams of medical school whenever his football days are done. He aims to become an orthopedic surgeon. He wants to ensure what happened to him — a misdiagnosis that nearly cost him a limb — doesn't happen to another football player chasing his dreams.

He plays like a man with a second chance, like a running back chasing the last roster spot. He's both. His first NFL touchdown Saturday in St. Louis was fitting on a goal-line play, Varga took the handoff and plowed into Rams linebacker Marshall McFadden at the 2-yard-line. A moment later McFadden was laying on his back in the end zone. Varga was spiking the football in celebration.

The touchdown proved the difference in the Colts' only preseason win.

"Beeeeasssttttt," Colts tight end Dwayne Allen calls him. "I love that about him. Put him out there, it doesn't matter — running back, special teams, he gets the job done."

Varga has one last shot — Thursday's game — to keep that job.

It's a meaningless preseason game that happens to mean everything to one player.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.