Nearly two years ago, Washington football team quarterback Alex Smith suffered a horrific leg injury during a game against the Houston Texans. As a new ESPN documentary shows, the fracture led to 17 surgeries, a blood infection, and a decision no athlete wants to make: whether to amputate his leg.

The documentary, titled Project 11, is the first time the full extent of Smith’s injuries, his recovery, and his current status have been made public. Physical therapist and ESPN injury analyst Stephania Bell reported on the story for more than a year for the documentary, produced by Daniel Lindbergh. The hour-long film will air as an episode of the network’s newsmagazine E:60.

The title simply refers to Smith’s jersey number throughout his career, according to ESPN spokesperson Andy Hall. Doctors in the film describe Smith’s injury as something akin to a soldier’s injury from combat, Hall says, but he recovers to the point where he can walk unaided and push a blocking sled.

On November 18, 2018, Houston’s defensive players J.J. Watt and Kareem Jackson sacked Smith in the third quarter, bending his right leg backwards and causing a spiral and compound fracture of his right tibia and fibula. That season, Smith had signed a four-year contract extension, and was leading the team to a 6-3 record. Following the injury, the team lost six of the remaining seven games. In the immediate aftermath, Watt said he “felt sick and terrible” on the Dan Patrick Show and tweeted that he was “absolutely gutted” by the incident.

As Smith says in one preview clip from Project 11, the doctors went from “They’re gonna fix this” to saying, “Maybe cutting off your leg’s the best thing.”

As the documentary reveals in detail, the injury led to sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition caused by an infection that spread to his blood. The 35-year-old quarterback and former No.1 draft pick underwent 17 surgeries in total and was rehabilitated alongside U.S. military veterans. With the complications caused by the infection, Smith feels lucky to be able to walk again and “very much lucky to be alive,” as he told ESPN’s Outside the Lines.

“No NFL player has ever been through what Alex Smith has,” E:60 executive producer Andy Tennant said in a release. “He’s normally a very private person, but he wanted to document his road to recovery as well and as detailed as possible, with the hope that future players could use it as a road map.”

https://twitter.com/E60/status/1253064034921984008

The documentary, edited from more than 90 hours of original and archival footage, includes interviews with Smith, his current and former coaches and teammates, his family, and Watt, who made the tackle on Smith.

In one clip from September 2019, Smith shows off his battle wounds, showing how his right leg was essentially pieced back together from parts of his left leg: “The scars … where to start … Ok, well this guy is where they took part of my quad, and that’s what is down here. That’s skin from my thigh right there, and this bulk is that muscle,” he says, pointing to different parts of his scarred leg. “The rest of these guys are skin grafts, which come in like this, and then I have my knee incision from the rod going in. This is where they were up searching for infection.”

Eerily, Smith’s injury came exactly 33 years to the day after former Washington quarterback Joe Theismann’s own hard-to-watch leg injury. Theismann said as much on Twitter when it happened: “Alex’s leg is exactly like mine 33 yrs ago.”

While Theismann’s injury was career ending, Smith hopes to return to the sport, saying in the teaser that “football might not totally be out of the picture.”

As the once-promising quarterback says in the clip, “My future: Nobody knows it.”

Project 11 airs Friday at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN.