Comments on: The semantics of a strain

By: Zach

Zach — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:31:16 +0000

Right. If Rodgers had a grade 3 strain – which is what teams, I find, usually mean when they bust out the term “tear” (as in, “he tore his groin”) – that would mean his calf muscle basically tore in half and/or ripped off its anchor at one end. In which case I doubt he’d be WALKING, much less practicing, since his calf wouldn’t be…um…working. But I suppose its POSSIBLE.

My best guess is a grade 2 strain here, which some teams refer to as a “partial” or “slight” tear, with the latter being less severe in terms of games missed, and both being less bad than an unmodified “tear”. Usually.

By: Craig Zumsteg

Craig Zumsteg — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:18:57 +0000

Thanks for the input here! I agree with you in that, in my experience as well, team/player use of the word, “tear,” typically means that the player will miss some games, if not the rest of the season. It’s always frustrating that we have to rely on such sloppy terminology to get any idea of what’s really going on, but that’s the world of coachspeak, right? I’m with you though that Rodgers’ case seems like a smokescreen, especially since he’s been practicing a bit. Can’t see him doing that if this was too serious of an injury.

By: Zach

Zach — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 14:16:00 +0000

Slight edit: …that would be nice and would tell us which ones are actually “tears” (in the NFL parlance), but…

By: Zach

Zach — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 14:13:47 +0000

Yeah, differentiating between “tears” and “strains” is always fun. In my experience, though, if somebody on the team actually uses the word “tear” it means on a macroscopic level…unless, I suppose, they’re using it to make people think Rodgers won’t start 🙂 Anyway, yeah, a “slight tear” and “significant strain” are the exact same damn thing. A macroscopic tear is a significant strain.

In the past it seems to mostly work out that a stated, quoted “tear” –> multiple weeks missed, or IR (think to a pec, triceps, biceps, quad, hamstring, etc.). “Strains” are much more highly variable. All that said, if I had to guess here, the use of the “slight” modifier means this is just smoke (as stated above, this isn’t exactly false) and Rodgers will play this weekend.

If we actually got grade information regularly on the strains, that would be nice and would tell us which ones are actually tears, but this is a pretty good approximation for most purposes.