Crap, I have to write a whole piece about this guy without accidentally calling him David. I can’t even do that in casual conversation. Honestly, I have a piece of paper next to the keyboard right now with the name “Derek,” just so that I can be sure I’m talking about the right Carr. Damn you, journeyman QB David. Also, before we go any further, what exactly is Derek doing with his left hand in that photo above? This is just one man’s opinion, but it looks to me like some disinterested imaginary nipple tweaking.
Derek Carr (the one who hasn’t yet proven how stinky he is) went down in Sunday’s game with what is now being reported as a left knee MCL sprain and a left high ankle sprain. Things can always change as more tests are run, but so far, Derek has said about the dual injuries, “Both of them are sprained.” We’ll see whether or not that’s the extent of the injury, but, since that’s all that’s been said so far, let’s just take that as the truth for right now, shall we?
It’s Sunday evening as I write this, and I’ve yet to see the usual crop of premature estimations popping up. I’m interested to see what the consensus turns out to be, but I’ll go ahead and be the brave one and offer mine up first. He’ll be out three weeks. If you want to give me the usual wiggle room that all reporters desire, I’d get as vague as, “Carr will miss two, three, or four weeks.” Before I go on, let me nail that down to specifics, as tons of reporters get even more vague when they try to apply their guesses to actual schedules. The Raiders have a Week 5 bye. I’m saying that Carr will not play Week 6 versus San Diego. I see him coming back for the Week 7, Week 8, or Week 9 game. But if I just have to pick one, it’s that Week 8 at Cleveland.
In my ridiculous database, I have plenty of examples of players with either MCL sprains or high ankle sprains. (In fact, high ankle sprains are somehow my favorite injury to log, as they’re still often wrapped up in mysterious cloudy coachspeak). In fact, I have 31 good, “clean,” examples of MCL sprains, and 66 good, “clean,” examples of high ankle sprains. By “clean,” I mean that the player returned during the season rather than going on injured reserve or finishing the season on the bench. Let’s take a look at how these look, represented in basic bar graphs:
MCL Sprain return to play
As far as I can tell (and there’s totally some guesswork in there), the two injuries will not have conflicting rehabs. Neither of them should require surgery, and they should both require a lot of, “taking it easy.” Carr should pretty much stay off of that leg for either injury, so it’s not like one injury compounds the other…. as long as we’re still talking about two pretty straightforward sprains as Carr told us. Given that background, I think we can pretty much just overlay those two charts into one to get us a (really really) rough guess. Sure, that’s probably fudging all sorts of proper statistical work, but let’s do it anyway:
MCL sprain and high ankle sprain combined projection
See where I’m getting that three week estimate now? Looking at each of the separate MCL sprain and high ankle sprain charts, you can tell that general two to four weeks missed range is pretty fat. Put those charts together though, and WHAM-O, it’s obvious. If you trust my mashed up injury timeline (and I’m still not convinced that you should), then by far the most frequent return would be after missing exactly three weeks. That’s when 29% of players have come back from MCL OR high ankle sprains (not trying to mislead you… I have no record of players with this exact combination). Cast that net a little wider into the, “two to four weeks,” range, and you now see about 61% of the players returning during those three exact weeks. So there, I’ve at least shown my work and you can get a basic idea of where I’m coming up with my guess. Let me know if you see any reporters doing the same. Unlike a lot of my criticism of NFL coverage, I actually have a feeling that most people might go too pessimistic in their estimates, as they’re not aware that the two rehabs pretty much dovetail into the same rehab timeline. I’ll be sure to keep tabs on this and point out how incredibly right I am.
Update, October 12, 2014: Holy crud…. he’s back! I did not see that one coming. Carr ended up resting for the bye week and then coming right back to play today, meaning he missed only one week. That’s an amazingly quick comeback, and, what’s more, he even looks good playing against San Diego now. I had guessed he’d be out three weeks, or at least something in the two-to-four-week range. Wrong-zo. Now I have to do some digging and try to prove that his injuries were less severe than we were led to believe. Nope, I have no real information on that, but it’s either make that case or admit that I missed the mark on this one. In my defense, my cobbled-together chart up above shows my estimate that maybe 12% of players might come back after missing only one week. Still, I never thought that would be the case here, and I certainly never would’ve thought that Carr would be playing so well so soon after returning.
