Marcus Mariota, Tyrod Taylor, Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, Matt Forte, Kendall Wright, and Antonio Gates. That’s a pretty talented pool of players that are all in some stage of rehab from MCL injuries. With this many MCL injuries being so front-and-center to football fans, it’s safe to wonder what’s going on. Why are we seeing so many MCL injuries all of the sudden? I’d like to nip this one in the bud right now and suggest that, most likely, this is just random dumb luck. And, even if it isn’t random, there are so many variables at play that we’d never be able to just pick the lucky winner.
My first thought is that this is just our brains trying to make sense of randomness. Yes, it seems like there have been a lot of MCL injuries lately. But perhaps that is simply because they’ve happened to such prominent players. If the same number of MCL injuries fell upon special teamers and reserve players, we’d never notice. In my database, I show 31 confirmed MCL injuries in 2014. Obviously my 2015 database is not complete, but so far at least, the number of MCL injuries this year does not appear to be out-of-whack. We’re halfway through the season, and I’ve logged 18 so far.
Even if we do end up with more MCL injuries this season, I’d say that it might be nearly impossible to find one culprit to pin them on. Just in thinking about this over the last day, I can think of four distinct possibilities. The first possibility could be that field turf and athletic cleats have become “grippier.” MCL injuries often happen when a player’s foot is dug into the ground while he receives a blow from a helmet to the outside of his knee. (You can read more like this in my MCL overview). Obviously, the goal of both good turf and shoes is to provide traction, so you can’t really fault them for having too much traction.
Another possibility here is that we could just be seeing more injuries because the players are bigger, stronger, and faster. Muscles can be strengthened, but ligaments and tendons cannot, so they are often the weakest link on an athlete’s body. This is charming narrative for two reasons. On the one hand, we love to think the athletes of today are absolutely the best ever. On the other hand, their puny ligaments make them just like us. It’s like seeing celebrities shopping at Walmart in sweatpants and a Day-Glo green fanny pack.
One more possibility here is that tacklers are going lower on the body so as to avoid the head hits that they will most likely be penalized for. This is another seductive narrative as it gives us a very simple cause and effect, while also making us think that the new safety regulations are either helping or hurting player safety, whichever side we want to collect casual evidence for.
I would suggest that there is one culprit though that is actually fairly likely. This is something close to my injury-blogging world, so I have all sorts of bias here as well. I would guess that any possible increase in MCL injuries might come down simply to how injuries are reported and covered in the media. With the rise of fantasy football came a thirst for better, more specific injury information. Rather than settle for a vague term like, “knee injury,” fans and reporters started digging in a little more. People were more likely to ask whether a knee injury was an ACL, PCL, MCL, LCL, hyperextension, deep bone bruise, or something else. From my own (biased) experience, I can tell you that there’s often a point of diminishing returns when I try to pull details on an older NFL injury. Even injuries from as recently as 2005 or so will often have scant medical details reported, leaving me with a dead end. But with recent injuries, I can often find very specific information. Older reports often refer to an injury as simply a, “knee injury,” or, “knee sprain,” whereas modern reports would break it down to specific ligaments. It’s thought that the MCL sprain is the most common knee injury, so it’s safe to say that a great deal of these older, “knee sprains,” were specifically MCL injuries. In my opinion, it’s more likely that over the last few years the reporting has changed much more than the actual game or athletes. Just my thoughts though… feel free to go ahead and narrative the shit out of this if it makes you happy.
