Believe it or not, I actually feel a little bad being so pessimistic about injured NFL players. It’s not that I want them to be injured, or that I don’t want to see them bounce right back, it’s just that time after time we seem to overlook the possible complications and setbacks, and I feel I need to highlight those risks. After (yet again) expressing pessimism about Le’Veon Bell’s knee injury from last season, I spent a bit of time thinking about my outlook and my pessimism. Rather than put the blame squarely on myself, I decided to drag Sir Issac Newton onto my side, whether or not he likes it. If Newton really wanted to disagree with me, he should’ve lived another 289 years.
Issac Newton dominated science. Absolutely crushed it. Like GOAT, though maybe he’s the second-fiddle Peyton Manning to Albert Einstein (who is clearly Tom Brady in this analogy). Regardless, Newton was the man. Among his revolutionary laws of physics, I’m going to focus on his first law, which by the time any of us can understand it, is dumbed down to something like this: (from Wikipedia)
An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless a force acts upon it.
There’s something very simple here that I feel is entirely applicable to NFL injuries. For my purposes, let’s update this law to:
A player who is injured will remain injured until proven otherwise.
Let’s boil things way down. For our purposes, imagine, “injured,” to be a binary designation. Either a player is injured or he is not. He cannot be neither, and he cannot be both. Until an injured player actually returns and plays another game, he is injured, no matter what the specific details might be.
Now don’t jump the gun by pointing out that time itself and the human body’s healing process count as an outside force that acts upon the player. Yes, that is entirely true. But the problem is, we often have no way of knowing how close the player is to returning to the lineup. Even after a player returns to practice, he is often held out of games, or worse yet for fantasy owners, is designated a, “game-time decision.” That’s the sort of ambiguity that can be avoided by adapting Newton’s first law.
Think of the many advantages of adopting this injury philosophy. In fantasy football (traditional or DFS), you will sometimes be wrong and miss out on some value. Someone else will take on the risk of rostering a recently-injured player, and that risk will sometimes pay off. But I would argue that the upside of that risk is heavily countered by the downside. Rostering a player who either doesn’t start or is ineffective or limited due to recent injury would likely be a devastating blow to any fantasy lineup. If volatility is your goal and the cost is right, there’s a great argument for recently-injured players. But this is a situation where an owner would truly need to understand the gamble, and I’m not confident that most do.
Aside from fantasy football, this injury philosophy could do wonders to relieve the stress of football fans. Rather than comb through multiple media reports trying to get everyone’s (often conflicting) takes on what’s happening with an injured player, you can just tune out the noise and focus on something else. This is the equivalent of taking a roadtrip and saying, “We’ll get there when we get there.” Or not setting an alarm clock to wake up in the morning (obviously back before I had kids that make it their goal to wake me up at 6 a.m. no matter what).
To those who would question the final accuracy of Newton’s law of NFL injuries, I would argue that it’s actually fairly accurate. Every week (or day/month/whatever) that a player remains injured, you were correct in your assumption. At some unknown point, that player will return to the lineup, and you will then be wrong for assuming that he would remain injured. But you will be wrong once, and only once. Those people that try to read the tea leaves and predict the return of an injured player might make false predictions multiple times during the recovery of one player. (Believe me, I appreciate the irony of this post, as I very much make it my business to make such return predictions.)
So, what do you say readers? Does Isaac Newton’s first law have anything useful to add to our fantasy football decisions? I’m curious to know how this sits with people.
