How long will a player be out? That’s what we all really want to know, right? In an attempt to answer that question, this section will give general return-to-play historical charts as well as some background on the injury itself. All of the charts used here come from my own NFL injury database. This of course, brings up all sorts of questions, which I will attempt to answer here. Who doesn’t love a good Q&A? Okay, maybe Marshawn Lynch.
How good is your database?
Pretty good. Not perfect. Not by a long shot. But good. I’m a one man show, and there are some limits to my database. It only goes back to about the 2010 NFL season. It misses plenty of minor injuries, especially to reserve and role players. I don’t tend to pay much attention to vague injuries that show up on the reports every week, yet the player still plays. Like Tom Brady’s shoulder. Not interested. I’m after the bigger injuries, the ones where people actually miss time. I have made every effort to build the best injury database possible and to present it as honestly as possible, but there are limits to it, and I’d be a jackass not to admit that. Also, as always, I will point out those shortcomings when they come up. For example, the fact that I’m mostly focused on injuries that actually result in games missed means that I sometimes minimize how many players can come back from minor injuries without missing any time. With minor injuries, my return-to-play charts are missing a great deal of the players who never missed a game. I will point this out on a case by case basis.
Are your return to play estimates better than those of, “the experts?”
Sometimes. Depends on what you mean by, “experts.” My estimates are often better than what NFL reporters put out there. If nothing else, my historical charts give you a better idea of the true range of outcomes. I’m not saying that reporters are lazy, but I will say that they don’t often look to the past for comparable injury examples. This is understandable, as reporters are usually working on a time and character limit. Typically, a reporter will just repeat what a source has told them, and those sources can be quite suspect in regards to their level of optimism. As for other experts, such as doctors or team staff or even players, I would fine tune my answer. I would say that in the absence of specific medical details, my historical estimates are better than the experts. I dug into this in detail here. A doctor might have a great idea of what a typical NFL rehab timeframe should be, but it will often overlook the true range of what actual recent rehabs have been. Now if we have a well-sourced doctor with specific player injury knowledge giving us a return-to-play estimate and backing it up with clear reasoning, then yeah, that’s probably better than what I’m laying down here. But that doesn’t happen much.
All injuries are different, so how can you compare any two?
That’s true, they are all different. Different players, different positions, different teams, different medical staffs… different everything. No argument there. But again, in the absence of specific medical medical details, a historical comparison approach is a great place to start. This is especially true when my database provides a large sample size. Again, read this for a closer look.
How do you count bye weeks?
Good question, me, thanks for asking. It depends. If the bye week is in the middle of an extended absence, then I count it as one more week missed. For example, if a player injures his ankle and misses Week 7, has a Week 8 bye, and misses Week 9, then it’s safe to call that a three week absence. That player was out for three weeks, even though he only missed two games. However, the counting can get murky if a player misses only one week and a following bye. Another murky situation is when a player has an injury before the bye, but plays again the week coming out of the bye. In cases like that, I try to research practice reports and interviews and make a judgement call as to whether the player would’ve been active had the team played during that bye week, and then log it accordingly. For example, if a player is not practicing or still extremely limited during a bye week, I think it’s fairly safe to say that they had not yet fully recovered from the injury and that they would not have played and there been a game. Short answer, I often count bye weeks as time missed, but I try to be careful about it.
Do you count NFL preseason games missed?
Sometimes. Like bye weeks, this is a good example of where I have to use some judgement and just make the best, most honest call I can. If a player misses time but it is limited to only the preseason, I generally don’t include it in my charts. Preseason is preseason, and I’m not stupid. But if a preseason injury bleeds over into the regular season, then I’ll often use it. For example, if a player dislocates his elbow in Week 3 of the preseason, and ends up missing the next three games, then I will count that as missing a full three games, even though only two of those games are regular season games. The fact that it carries over into the regular season tells me that the return-to-play total is accurate and that the team isn’t just being overly cautious (as they might be if the injury was limited to only the preseason).
That sounds weird. What other weird judgement calls do you make?
I assure you that all my decisions, weird or not, are made as deliberately and honestly as possible. Hell, I’m writing about them here, that has to count for something. I tend to dismiss a lot of injuries that I deem to be murky. For example, if a rookie or reserve player gets put on the injured reserve list with a vague, often minor sounding, injury, I try to ignore that. I mean, I log it in my database, but I screen it out of my RTP estimates. This is especially true if the injury designation shows up right before roster cut-down dates, such as in August. If a rookie UDFA QB goes on IR in August for something only described as a, “shoulder injury,” then I throw that out. Make sense? I attempt to screen out late-season roster management decisions too, such as putting a role player on IR just to free up a roster slot for a playoff push. It’s a messy, messy world with these injuries, and I’m just trying to put the cleanest data out there. Part of this process involves screening out anything that doesn’t reflect a true return-to-play rehab timeline.
Still sounds fishy. Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re telling us?
Fine. There’s one more thing, and it’s important. But again, I’ve never tried to hide it. There’s one judgement call that I make with these charts that is very important. I count re-injuries as continuations of the previous injury. What I am trying to do with these charts is to express the true cost of injuries in regards to playing time missed. I feel that my approach to re-injuries helps with that overall picture, but it needs to be explained. Let’s say a player misses two games with a high ankle sprain. Then the player comes back and re-injures the same ankle with the same high ankle sprain. The second time around, the player sits out another two games. How should this be counted? Did the player miss two games, two times that year? That’s how I log it in my database. But in order to show the true cost of the injury, I will enter that on one of my return-to-play charts as one injury with a four week absence. See what I did there? If I count this as a lesser injury (two weeks then another two weeks) it does not express the true cost of the injury from the start. It’s not exactly that I’m trying to make the injury more severe, it’s more that I’m trying to represent how much time each injury actually cost the player, even if it was a set-back or re-injury. If, for some reason, you want to read a lot more about this decision, read this.
How confident are you that your injury data is accurate?
Pretty confident. Like 90%. I dig through a lot of articles and different pieces, and I only log what I’m pretty confident in. For example, I will log a ton of vague, “knee injuries,” and those are pretty useless. But if I log something as an, “MCL sprain,” it means I found evidence of that specific injury. So, at least when it comes to my return-to-play charts, I’m pretty confident.
There, that does it for my self-written questions. If you have any real ones, put them in the comments and I’ll get to them. Might even throw them up here on this page if they tickle my fancy.
