As Antonio Bryant moans about a long, cramped flight from England two weeks ago delivering his surgically-repaired knee a setback, per Woody Cummings of TBO.com, Joe wants to remind readers of how screwed up Bryant’s knee, in fact, is.

They guy’s not dogging it.

Joe sees him as damaged goods who knows he needs to play to rack up numbers and get a fat contract somewhere next year. As we know, $10 million guaranteed isn’t enough for Antonio and his family to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

Here’s a flashback from the JoeBucsFan.com archives; Bryant’s own words about his knee on the Buccaneers Radio Network about five weeks ago:

Antonio Bryant on his injured knee: “Everybody thinks it’s the same injury. It’s not. What happened is, in the Dallas game when I cut back, because of the difference [after the preseason surgery] and the amount of tissue that was between my knee, I actually bruised the bone. Bone on bone from making the cutback on the skinny post. And that’s what aggravated my knee again. Actually, the swelling comes from the bone being swollen. But it’s actually healing so that the swelling is more so on the inside as opposed to the outside. It was actually all through the bone. But you could touch it on the outside. But you can’t touch it anymore. So it’s just, it’s a process, man. It’s a bone.

“It’s functional as far as I can go out there and do the certain things that we have to do to go out there and play. But I can’t practice because it will aggravate it. I can’t go out there and not practice full speed and not practice the way I play. But it’s just a matter of being at practice day to day doing minimal reps. Actually this week I took some reps just to get the feel.  …The only problem is now I don’t have any pain, it’s just the swelling. By having fluid in the knee it’s keeping me from actually running the way I want to run. So every Sunday I have to go in there and go ahead and say bye-bye to my little fluid thing and get ready to play.

“I definitely think I’m going to feel a whole lot better this week. That’s why I went out there. They don’t want me to practice. But i just felt like just for my teammates and just for Josh that, you know, it bothers me that I can’t go the way I want to. …Josh, especially in the state of mind he’s in, and being kind of thrown in there right off the bat, it’s a mindset. I want to be out so he can visibly see me, visibly see my number run those routes and not another receiver. So when the game comes, it’ll click, it’ll register, it’ll be like practice. So that’s why I’m urging, I’m trying to really pushing to get out there [in practice].”