Watt won’t make promises on when he’ll return

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HOUSTON — Texans defensive end J.J. Watt said Sunday that he isn’t certain when he’ll return from his recent back surgery.

“I can’t put a solid start date on when I can play,” Watt, who has never missed a regular-season game in his first five seasons with the Texans, said. “I don’t plan on missing my first game, but I can’t promise it. I’m doing everything I can to protect my body, but the older I get, the more I realize you have to be smart.”

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Watt had surgery on July 20 to repair a herniated disk in his back. His comments at Sunday’s first day of training camp were his first since the procedure, which sources have said could sideline him for six-to-10 weeks and potentially jeopardize his availability for the early part of Houston’s 2016 schedule.

“Last season I had a herniated disk in my back,” Watt said. “But it wasn’t a terrible herniation, so obviously I could keep playing. And then throughout the offseason, there would be slight flare-ups here and there, but we’d always get it under control. So it was nothing really bad.

“Right before training camp, we wanted to do a checkup and just to make sure and see where I was at,” he added. “Once the MRI came back, that’s when we realized it was worse than we thought. That’s when we knew, and that’s why it happened so close to training camp. “It’s not because it’s 90 degrees and I just didn’t feel like being out there,” Watt quipped.

Watt, the AP’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2014 and 2015 with a combined 38 sacks, said the surgery was a success.

“We took a whole bunch of junk out of my back, so now I feel good,” Watt said of the procedure, which removed the herniated disc. “For the first two weeks, [the doctor] told me to just walk and lay down. That’s my rehab. That’s all I’ve been doing. But they said as soon as the two weeks are up, I can ramp up quickly.”

Watt, who said he couldn’t recall the specific name of the surgery, said initially hearing the recommendation was difficult.

“It was tough. It’s one of those phone calls you don’t want to get. But it’s going to be the best for me in the long run. It’s one of those things where I’m glad we found it, because if we didn’t, it could’ve …

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