Sam Bradford pleasantly surprised about his knee

There are two camps of those following Sam Bradford in Philadelphia these days. The one, who expect him to skate through without incident and lead the Eagles to the playoffs. The other, those who are convinced he'll trip on a banana peel and break his leg.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but as for Bradford himself, things have been going better than originally thought.

"I think I feel better than what I was expecting," he said on Thursday, via the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I thought my knee would hold up, but I wasn't sure."

"From Day 1 when I wasn't taking reps, the goal was to be ready for training camp," he said. "So that when it got here, I was going to be able to go out there and not be limited. And that's where we've been so far. And you know, for me, I need the reps. So being out there and getting these reps have been great for me."

Bradford is coming off back-to-back tears of the ACL in his left knee, a condition that kept him from OTAs and minicamp before joining the first-team this summer as the presumed No. 1 starter in September.

Of course, this time last year, all was going well, too. Bradford took a recently repaired ACL into Cleveland in mid-August, only to fall to the same injury again. He knows it's the toughest test is yet to come.

"You know it's hard to simulate those game situations," he said. "We can do a little bit of it in practice, but until I'm able to get hit, you really can't simulate when the pocket breaks down and you gotta make a hard hitch up and then scramble. But I've been put in a few situations so far, and I felt like my knee has held its own."

That may be good news, but it would be hard to imagine he doesn't have some butterflies in his stomach for the Eagles' August 16 date with the Colts.