For once, I’ll just get right to it. 3-5 weeks. There, we’re done.
It bugs me when people can’t cut to the important junk. I’m a demanding guy, and I expect my sports reporters to be able to deliver with stuff like that. Instead, I often read crap like this:
Bengals believe Tyler Eifert dislocated his elbow. That’d likely put him out for an extended period of time. Tough break for good young TE.
— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) September 7, 2014
An, “extended period of time?” WTF am I supposed to do with that? Thanks a lot NFL expert. That’s like taking your car to a mechanic and the mechanic tells you that a repair will cost, “a certain amount of money.” This is the sort of blanket guestimating that I’m here to eliminate. If you have a number, throw it out there. And if you don’t, then at least admit to that. Or, at the very least, find some comparable historical examples you lazy twat. I guess I shouldn’t complain. If everyone was doing a better job with these estimates than I’d be doing… crud, maybe looking for a real job or something.
In case you couldn’t figure out the context there, we’re talking about Cincinnati Bengals TE Tyler Eifert. In yesterday’s Week 1 game, Eifert dislocated his elbow. That’s a big one. There is no “good dislocation,” in football, but I’d take shoulder any day over elbow. The elbow is much harder to dislocate, which means that, when it does become dislocated, the force that was necessary for the injury often causes all sorts of ugly ligament damage to boot. Plus, after you’ve dislocated a joint once, you’re way more likely than normal to dislocate it again in the future, as you’ve often damaged a lot of the structural support of the joint. It’s like, “buy the first dislocation, get the second and third for free.” (See LaMichael James).
As always, the big question is how players have recovered from a similar injury in the past. In 2012, DE J.J. Watt dislocated his elbow in the preseason, doing extensive damage to his ligaments, and then played through the entire season without missing a game. But that’s gross and people shouldn’t do that, so let’s try to just throw that example in the trash. For a better range of how ordinary humans deal with this injury, let’s look at three other players. In 2011, WR Danny Amendola (seriously, help me get “Fragile-dola” to stick as a nickname) missed three games after dislocating his elbow. In 2013, WR Jeremy Kerley missed four games with the same injury. Also in 2013, LB Justin Houston missed five games before coming back for the playoffs. So we’re looking at three, four, and five weeks missed there. Seems easy enough to just throw a, “3-5 week,” label on there, right? Yeah yeah, maybe it’s not an exact fit, but isn’t it way better than, “an extended period of time?”
Oh, and it would probably be irresponsible of me if I didn’t point out that Eifert might lose a little bit of blocking ability, as that’s an action that is pretty dependent on having a structurally sound elbow.
Update, September 10th: Today the Bengals moved Eifert to the injured reserve, designated for return list (sometimes called short-term IR). That means that the first week he would be eligible to return would be for the Week 10 game. I still don’t think that my 3 to 5 week estimate was bad, (and certainly better than, “an extended period of time,”) but this guy over here totally nailed it. That’s Geoff Hobson at Bengals.com saying that his guess is, “4 to 6 weeks,” and that Eifert is a candidate for the IR/DFR tag. Good call there dude, and you didn’t even spend all your free time building a database to predict that. Might be worth checking up on some of Hobson’s future predictions, as that one was spot-on. I wouldn’t have figured IR/DFR for a dislocated elbow, as it seems just a little too minor of an injury to waste that sometimes-valuable IR/DFR slot on (teams only get one per year). But I was wrong, Hobson was right. Also, as an added bonus, Hobson totally admitted that he was guessing, which, as you might know, is something that is near and dear to me.
