SMU wide receiver Cole Loftin was due for some good news. He got it Monday.

As a true freshman in 2008, he played in the Mustangs’ first three games, starting against nationally ranked TCU. He caught his first career touchdown against the Horned Frogs, but found out afterward he had played much of the second half with a broken collarbone. His season was over.

Wide receiver Cole Loftin has undergone operations on his collarbone and knee since his arrival at SMU (photo by Travis Johnston).

He returned in 2009, and was ready to be a significant contributor to the SMU passing game in 2010 until the Mustangs’ preseason workouts in August, “I was running forward,” Loftin said, “and when I stopped, I hyperextended my knee.”

He didn’t realize it at the time, but Loftin had done more than hyperextend the joint. He also had torn the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus in his right knee.

“Everyone says you hear a ‘pop’ when you tear your ACL, but I didn’t,” Loftin said. “Mine … I felt a little ‘pop,’ but I didn’t hear it. I rolled over and got up, and tried to jog it off.

“The trainers came over and they did their test, where they try to see how stable (the knee) is or figure out what happened, but they couldn’t tell if I had done anything.”

Loftin walked off the field that day under his own power. Classes had not yet started, but after icing the knee, he went to meetings with the rest of the receivers, thinking he had escaped serious injury.

“I thought I was going to be OK,” he said, “until the next morning. I could barely walk downstairs. It was huge. When I tried to walk, or jog, after I hurt it, I guess the muscles around it tightened up to protect the knee.”

Loftin underwent surgery Sept. 4 and embarked on an arduous rehabilitation program. The time and effort he put forth in the Ponies’ training room and weight room finally paid off this week, when Loftin received medical clearance Monday to resume all football drills. He also will take part in everything the other receivers do in the team’s spring workouts, which start April 4.

“It feels great,” Loftin said of his rebuilt knee. “With the collarbone, I had surgery, but after that, it was a ‘wait it out’ kind of thing — you have to just let the bone fuse back into itself.

“But with the knee, the ACL isn’t a bone. If you don’t rehab, you don’t get better. It’s a scary injury.”

Loftin said that he has been running as part of his rehab, although he has not yet tested his top-end speed.

“The main thing with the knee is getting my endurance back in the whole leg,” he said. “I get tired after running a route two or three times, when I could run them all day before.”

Loftin said that he just recently started running routes, and that he has gotten in some work with senior cornerback Sterling Moore, who also is recovering from knee surgery.

“We’re just doing some ‘off the line’ stuff, running some routes,” Loftin said. “It’s not like we’re testing each other when the ball comes. He’s working his way back, too, so we’re being careful.”

Loftin said he doesn’t anticipate being a different kind of receiver than he was before the injury. The time he spent working his knee back into shape might have altered his point of view a little, but he expects to be as effective a receiver as he was before getting hurt.

“I was able to get a different perspective,” he said of his time as a spectator on the Ponies’ sideline last year. “You’d ask, ‘what can I do to help the team win?’, but it’s tough when you’re not on the field. It’s not that you base your happiness on (teammates’) happiness, but it’s not a matter of ‘what kind of day did I have?’ Now it’s ‘what kind of day did the team have?

“The thing I worry about now is whether I’ll get my quickness back, whether I’ll be able to get in and out of my breaks, whether I’ll be able to work off the line. I think I will, so hopefully, I’ll be the same, old, reliable guy I was before.”