As everyone gears up for the NFL draft, there have been plenty of little morsels of information that have passed across my desk. Most of them are just the usual bullshit, and I’m always skeptical of anything coming out so close to draft day. NFL team executives play a ridiculous game of cat and mouse with players’ agents, and I try not to read much into it. Teams voice their concerns over prospective players, sometimes causing that players’ stock to plummet. Sometimes that’s valid, other times not so much. It’s even tougher to figure out what the truth is when these execs are voicing all this anonymously to anyone in the press who will listen. On the flip side, NFL agents try to douse the flames and then put up an equally dubious smokescreen that all of the incoming players are 100% healthy and will no doubt be the best players ever in the history of all sports. Because of all this, you shouldn’t read too much into anything in NFL news right now… even this very post I’m writing now.
Sometimes though I see something that raises my eyebrow a wee bit. This week, that something was a story about Wisconsin ILB Chris Borland. Borland has always been a tough one to figure out, so you might not be familiar with him. He was an absolute beast of a tackler in college, but, to use technical combine speak, his measureables pretty much sucked. In college, he seemed to play on pure instinct and passion, and he was wonderful. But he lacks the size, speed, and range typically seen in the NFL. Also, it’s illegal to talk about Borland without mentioning his ridiculously short T-Rex arms. The rumor (started just now by me) is that he can’t even reach stuff that’s been pushed to the back of the fridge, and that his college roommates used to tease him by leaving Leinies back there, sending Borland into a rage. Seriously, I hand-picked that photo of him just to showcase those stubby arms. Scroll up and look again.
Due to Borland’s lack of physical tangibles, it was already tough to predict where he might come off the draft board. Then, just to cloud things a little more, Borland has a deep history of shoulder problems. He tore the labrum in his left shoulder back in 2009, but played through the injury, delaying surgery until the offseason. The next season, he ended up reinjuring the same left shoulder and having a second surgery. He followed that up by injuring his other shoulder and having surgery on that one too. So we’re talking two surgeries on one shoulder, and one surgery on the other shoulder. Following so far? Due to these concerns, nobody can really agree on where he should rank in the draft. Some people have him listed as the second best at his ILB position in this year’s draft, but nobody seems bold enough to think he’ll be a first round pick. Sports Illustrated’s great Doug Farrar (the best sportswriter in Seattle) guessed round four or five. NFL.com thought about the same. CBS Sports thought maybe Borland could go as early as the second round, which was easily the most optimistic guess I found. But all that can probably be thrown in the trash now.
Now, right before the draft, a story leaked out that Borland’s twice-repaired left shoulder might not be all peachy, and that he might need a third surgery on it before playing in the NFL. I found this version in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. First of all, I need to make sure to point out that I’m just passing along a story here. I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t even have a real gut feeling about it, but it seems at least a little more detailed than some of the obviously fabricated stories. But, like the proverbial toothpaste in the tube, once this story was out, the damage was done. Whether it is entirely true or not might not matter. All that matters is whether NFL teams will think there’s even a chance that it’s true.
You might ask what the big deal here is. Dude had an injury, dude had surgery, dude played well, dude has proven he can come back, right? Maybe Borland is some Rudy/Rocky hybrid and he’ll do just fine in the NFL. Trouble is, there’s some a decent reason to think that he probably won’t. This info is from a study, and there should be an entire paragraph of disclaimers that I’ll sort of gloss over later. Basically, what this study says is that certain college football players with shoulder stabilization surgery go on to have shorter, less-productive careers than their college peers with healthy shoulders. More specifically that difference in NFL performance was mostly seen only in the positions of offensive line, defensive line, and linebacker. So, if we want to get sloppy and reduce this study to an easy-to-digest nugget, one could come away thinking that Borland will have a shorter career than just about every other LB on the board. Yup, that’s a sloppy conclusion, and there are some serious leaps in that logic, but there it is.
The study I’m referencing here was in the November 2011 issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine. This is a peer-reviewed academic journal, so it’s not just some pamphlet being printed in the garage of a vitamin salesman. The first author on the paper was Robert Brophy, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, MO. He is also the assistant team physician for the St Louis Rams, so he’s no stranger to real world sports medicine experience. In addition to this study, he has done a few other great ones that I’ll reference from time to time, and his work, despite some inherent limitations, is always refreshing to see simply because he uses true scientific methods. This is not some guy (like me) spitballing and calling it science.
For this study, Dr. Brophy took 42 college players with previous shoulder stabilization surgery (such as Borland’s shoulder labrum surgery) and matched them with 42 college players of the same age and position, but with no history of shoulder problems. He then monitored the length of all these players’ careers in the NFL, as well as how many games they started and how many games they played (without being an exclusive starter). I love Brophy’s study, and encourage you to read it, but it’s pretty technical and the full text is behind a paywall. If you don’t mind taking my word for it though, I’ll sum it up here for free. In a nutshell, he found that the differences between the careers of the surgically repaired group and the healthy group were not statistically significant for the most part. For example, running backs without shoulder surgery had similar careers to the running backs that had previously had shoulder surgery, at least in terms of career length, games started, and games played. Same with QB to QB comparisons, DB to DB, you get the idea. The glaring exception though was at the positions of offensive linemen, defensive linemen, and linebackers. Within this group, the players with previous shoulder surgery did not fare well. The study gives very specific numbers, and I love that. The average career length for those players without surgery was 6.7 years. With previous surgery it was 4.7 years. The average player at those positions without surgery played in 81 games during his career. The average with shoulder surgery played in 51 games. The average player without previous shoulder surgery started 61 games. The average with shoulder surgery started 37 games. Do you see how large those differences are?
Before we get too carried away, there are all sorts of the usual disclaimers here. This study had a sample size of only 42 players in each group. That’s not huge. Also, there is no exact apples-to-apples way to compare two players, so it’s not the perfect control. In Dr. Brophy’s defense, he points both of these problems out within the published paper, and he has attempted to address those problems fairly. I would add that the study monitored players from 1987 to 2000. That’s not exactly modern when it comes to sports medicine, and it could reasonably be argued that shoulder stabilization surgery has come so far since then that perhaps these trends are no longer valid. Also, I shouldn’t gloss over the fact that you are now reading my own spin on this study, so there’s some bias added there. Still, even given all those limitations, I think that this study is a great place to start a discussion.
Why is there such a difference in NFL career due to shoulder stabilization surgery for linemen and linebackers? Dr. Brophy doesn’t know. But he does speculate, and, true to my heart, he makes it clear that he’s simply offering some potential explanations rather than pretending he has all the answers. He notes that these players experience increased stress on their shoulders due to the positional requirements of constant blocking and tackling. It probably doesn’t help that these players focus on a strength training regimen that further stresses the shoulder. If that’s not bad enough, Dr. Brophy points out that players at these positions typically use their arms and shoulders in a manner that is incredibly stressful to the surgical repair itself. Unlike this feast, that’s not a great combo for anyone.
Given some of this background, I think it’s fair to wonder if an NFL executive or personnel man would be afraid to touch Borland. Between his lack of physical tangibles and his injury history, which seems to be bubbling up yet again, there is certainly room for doubt as to his NFL future. All I’m saying is keep an eye on him during this draft, as it might be interesting to see which teams are scared off and which team eventually takes a gamble. Hopefully the team that lands him either has a locker with low shelves, or they give him a few of these guys. Come on, you know I can never resist the cheap sign-off joke.
Update: May 12th, 2014. Chris Borland was selected by the San Francisco 49ers in the third round (77th overall). That’s a lot higher than I expected, and I’m curious to see how he pans out.
