Colts punter Rigoberto Sanchez to miss time after cancer diagnosis

Colts punter Rigoberto Sanchez’s mysterious absence on Sunday was due to a cancer diagnosis, caught in the nick of time.

The Colts were forced to play, in many ways, their toughest game of the year on Sunday against the Titans without so many key players that the absence of punter and special teams wizard Rigoberto Sanchez almost went under the radar.

But that’s certainly no longer the case, now that Sanchez has revealed what caused him to miss the action.

Sanchez released a statement through the team on Monday morning announcing that his doctors had caught a cancerous tumor over the weekend, with surgery to come on Tuesday. Luckily, the diagnosis came before the cancer had spread.

Though it seems this dreaded disease has been caught in the nick of time, all of us who’ve been through the fight or witnessed a loved one fighting knows that there is never a cut-and-dried solution here. The Colts family will now stand by Sanchez in the weeks and months that follow.

The fourth-year punter, alongside Rodrigo Blankenship, has formed the core of an exceptional young special teams unit, full of fervor and quirkiness. Needless to say, the Colts would miss Sanchez’s impact if he had to miss time for any number of more standard on-field reasons.

This type of absence will be devastating.

Surely armed with the knowledge regarding what exactly had happened to Sanchez, Frank Reich took to the microphone on Sunday and told the assembled media only that a “physical issue” had kept their regular punter from game action. We never could’ve imagined news this horrible would follow that innocuous comment.

We’ll be sending our best wishes to a beloved member of the Colts community, who’ll be doing his best Darius Leonard impression for the next several weeks and fighting as hard as humanly possible until there’s no more fighting to be done.

Clearly, the woes of Sunday’s action pale in comparison.

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