By Dylan Fink | Sports Writer
The injury bug has been a regular visitor to Baylor basketball the past few seasons.
On Monday afternoon, head coach Scott Drew announced that fifth-year guard JJ White has been ruled out for the remainder of the season with a stress fracture in his foot. The Omaha transfer has not played since a Nov. 24 win against Creighton.
“He’s tried to come back,” Drew said. “It looks like he won’t be able to return this year, but that’s not by lack of effort.”
White’s shutdown marks the third Baylor player to suffer a season-ending injury this year, and the ninth since the program’s 2021 national championship.
Along with White, freshman forward Maikcol Perez was ruled out for the season in September with an ACL tear. Junior center Juslin Bodo Bodo showed up to fall practice with a forearm injury that has kept the High Point transfer off the court as well this season. Senior wing Dan Skillings Jr., who has been listed as day-to-day for multiple weeks with a knee injury, played 21 minutes in Tuesday’s loss to Kansas State. It was his first game since January.
The inability to escape untimely injuries has consistently dwindled the green and gold’s depth in recent seasons.
“Players are so sport-specific nowadays,” Drew said. “They grow up playing one sport year-round, and with the wear and tear on those muscles, there actually was predicted that there would be more injuries in sports. Especially versus back in our day where you played three, four, five different sports.”
Sport specialization has been a noted cause of an increase in tendon and ligament injuries across the basketball world. The NBA saw a 190% increase in ligament-related injuries in 2025, per data collected by Forbes.
Still, other Division I programs have managed to avoid such high numbers of injuries and depth issues. While basketball-related injuries are on the rise worldwide, the injury bug seems to have securely cemented itself in Waco lately.
“I think part of it is medical technology,” Drew said. “I’m sure if they put any of us under everything we have, they’d find something wrong with us.”
Medical technology in the sports world has grown rapidly in the past decade. Now, high level programs have wearable sensors and 3D scans that allow medical staff to assess in real time the effects of acceleration forces, jump counts, fatigue levels and lateral stress, and how they each affect soft-tissue injury risk.
While the benefit of advanced medical technology has helped keep players safe and healthy, there is a rising question in how risk assessment has discouraged old-school mentalities of playing through smaller injuries.
“This game honors toughness,” Boston Celtics general manager Brad Stevens said in a 2018 interview. “The more you understand basketball you’ll start to see that just again and again.”
The rising toll of injuries for Baylor has affected the program’s ceiling of success recently as depth has been a recurring issue for the Bears. This season, with three rotation players out for the season and a fourth listed as day-to-day, Drew has been forced to lead his team into against the gauntlet of the Big 12 with a rotation of seven or eight players.
“I’m young so I think I should be able to play 40 minutes,” redshirt sophomore guard Cameron Carr said. “It’s been a little challenging. You always want to step on the court with your friends and you never want to see them hurt, so that’s always the challenging piece.”
Drew noted how the seemingly random cause of injuries has been a recurring frustration this season, as players’ health was repeatedly out of the program’s hands.
“Maikcol Perez just gets here and tears [his ACL] in the first week, so it’s not like we wore him down,” Drew said. “Bodo gets injured before he got here, so those are two of them. Now JJ gets a stress fracture … That’s one that happened on our watch. Dan went down, and unfortunately that can happen at any time.”
In a conference praised for its depth and high-octane competition, the Bears have yet to find their footing. Baylor (13-12, 3-9 Big 12) has witnessed its worst conference record since 2005, with a handful of close losses stinging with noticeable fatigue from lack of depth.
“Things are different with NIL and the portal,” Drew said. “Teams aren’t as deep as they once were. If you get a couple injuries, that really does affect you.”
The Bears are currently 14th in the Big 12 and look like a long shot for the NCAA tournament.
Baylor will face off against Arizona State (14-12, 5-8 Big 12) at 3 p.m. Saturday at Foster Pavilion. The game will be broadcast on ESPN2.
