Are smaller players more injury-prone?

[poundaway]

 

[PantherOnTheProwl1523]

10 minutes ago, poundaway said:

 

The NFL is a totally different animal compared to college football. The NFL opponents will give Young a real test of his durability.

Edited April 7, 2023 by PantherOnTheProwl1523

[Mr. Scot]

9 hours ago, MHS831 said:

Are smaller players more injury-prone?

There are many ideas about what makes a player more injury prone, and many people point to size as a possible culprit. Namely, some people claim that smaller players are more likely to get injured playing football because their bodies are less suited to handle NFL collisions. This is at least a fairly straightforward question to study, as originally done here. However, we should separate this by position group, as we saw in Part 1 of this series that different position groups have different rates of injury, and more mobile positions (RB, WR, DB, LB) tend to have the highest rate of injury, while less mobile positions (OL, QB) tend to have the lowest rate of injury. The overall injury rate by position is summarized in the table below. Remember than an Athlete Exposure (AE) is defined as a game played or a practice session in which a player was listed as a full participant.

Injury Rate By Position

Position	Injury Rate per 1000 AEs (Standard Error)
RB	20.7 (0.5)
DB	17.4 (0.3)
WR	17.1 (0.4)
LB	17.1 (0.3)
TE	16.9 (0.5)
DL	15.1 (0.3)
OL	12.8 (0.3)
QB	8.6 (0.4)
ST	4.4 (0.3)
Total	15.1 (0.1)

Clearly, if we just looked at injury rate vs weight, it would appear that smaller players are more likely to be injured, but that is only because the most injured position groups happen to have smaller, more mobile players. Having established this baseline, we can then plot the injury rate vs weight for each of these position groups.

For the most part, it actually looks like smaller players are less likely to be injured, not more likely. However, each graph has a slightly different pattern that is worth describing.

• DB is perhaps the easiest plot to interpret, and shows a clear increasing risk of injury based on size.
• DL shows a similar pattern, but the effect is not as large and it is overall a much flatter plot, indicating size is not strongly correlated to injury for DL. The up-down-up shape of the curve may be due to conflation of DEs and DTs.
• LB actually shows a slightly decreased risk of injury for larger LBs up until the heaviest weight category, which has significantly increased risk.
• OL shows a clearly increasing risk of injury based on size, except for the highest weight category, which has greatly decreased risk of injury (this may be the threshold at which OL can simply win with size).
• QB also shows a clearly increasing injury rate based on size.
• RB shows an increasing injury rate based on size up to a point, then a decreasing injury rate. This pattern may again be because two slightly different position groups (HBs and FBs) are being lumped in the same category together.
• TE also shows an increasing injury rate up to a point, then a decrease. It may be due to larger TEs being used primarily as blockers rather than pass catchers.
• WR shows a strong correlation between increased size and increased rate of injury, although the very smallest weight category of WR also had an increased rate of injury.

Overall, these data seem to indicate that smaller players are actually a bit less prone to injury within a given position group, although usage seems to play a much bigger role than size in determining injury rate. My big takeaway from this is not that teams should target smaller or larger players, but rather just that teams should not assume that smaller players are more prone to injury, as injury history is a much better predictor of future injury than size.

https://www.hogshaven.com/2019/6/22/18658887/understanding-injuries-in-the-nfl-part-3

Haven't read the whole thread, but there's a factor here that I think is kind of important.

Is this data about injuries in general or does it break them down by type?

A big guy blowing a knee because he's too heavy or a runningback tearing a ligament cutting on bad turf is a lot different than a guy at quarterback (or any other position, honestly) getting knocked out by a crushing hit.

That's the type of injury that scares people with Young. I doubt anybody's more worried about him blowing a knee because he's smaller. A concussion or a shoulder injury because he got crushed by a 300 plus pound DT though? Yeah.

So unless we're breaking this down by types of injury, it's not as pertinent to the Young vs Stroud debate. 

[PantherOnTheProwl1523]

3 minutes ago, Mr. Scot said:

Haven't read the whole thread, but there's a factor here that I think is kind of important.

Is this data about injuries in general or does it break them down by type?

A big guy blowing a knee because he's too heavy or a runningback tearing a ligament cutting on bad turf is a lot different than a guy at quarterback (or any other position, honestly) getting knocked out by a crushing hit.

That's the type of injury that scares people with Young. I doubt anybody's more worried about him blowing a knee because he's smaller. A concussion or a shoulder injury because he got crushed by a 300 plus pound DT though? Yeah.

So unless we're breaking this down by types of injury, it's not as pertinent to the Young vs Stroud debate. 

 If we do draft Young I hope it doesn't turn out like this did.

[poundaway]

6 minutes ago, Mr. Scot said:

Haven't read the whole thread, but there's a factor here that I think is kind of important.

Is this data about injuries in general or does it break them down by type?

A big guy blowing a knee because he's too heavy or a runningback tearing a ligament cutting on bad turf is a lot different than a guy at quarterback (or any other position, honestly) getting knocked out by a crushing hit.

That's the type of injury that scares people with Young. I doubt anybody's more worried about him blowing a knee because he's smaller. A concussion or a shoulder injury because he got crushed by a 300 plus pound DT though? Yeah.

So unless we're breaking this down by types of injury, it's not as pertinent to the Young vs Stroud debate. 

If a guy blows out his knee because of his size...that doesn't count.  But if a guy takes a big hit and is out, that does.  Whatever.

Its purely subjective to say if some one was hurt because of their size. 

 

[stan786]

11 minutes ago, Mr. Scot said:

Haven't read the whole thread, but there's a factor here that I think is kind of important.

Is this data about injuries in general or does it break them down by type?

A big guy blowing a knee because he's too heavy or a runningback tearing a ligament cutting on bad turf is a lot different than a guy at quarterback (or any other position, honestly) getting knocked out by a crushing hit.

That's the type of injury that scares people with Young. I doubt anybody's more worried about him blowing a knee because he's smaller. A concussion or a shoulder injury because he got crushed by a 300 plus pound DT though? Yeah.

So unless we're breaking this down by types of injury, it's not as pertinent to the Young vs Stroud debate. 

Would that not be baked into the data, if all size players get a similar rate of certain types injuries but small players take other injuries more due to physicality you should see a bump in small players getting injured comparatively because you are adding an injury risk on top of an already assumed one.

[stan786]

3 minutes ago, PantherOnTheProwl1523 said:

 If we do draft Young I hope it doesn't turn out like this did.

Ah yeah the guy who weighs more than CJ.

[poundaway]

2 minutes ago, PantherOnTheProwl1523 said:

 If we do draft Young I hope it doesn't turn out like this did.

If only these guys were taller.  Then they wouldn't have gotten hurt.

[frankw]

Reading through most of this thread the conclusion is people will decide the significance of the size concerns based on how much they like him. Those who love him see little to no issue at all. While those who want to assess the risk level for him long term as a prospect given our steep investment are more apprehensive.

And look I like him a lot personally. But the combine just wasn't a good look and neither was skipping the weigh in at his own pro day. If he was indeed not wanting to aggravate his shoulder that's concerning and if he just didn't want to because he gorged on food or water to get that weight number it's also concerning. I would feel a lot more comfortable about him if none of the above happened. If anything I'd respect the hell out of him even more for doing his thing at the combine and owning his weight good or bad. That's the kind of mentality you need if you're going to become the smallest starting QB in the NFL.

[PantherOnTheProwl1523]

14 minutes ago, poundaway said:

If only these guys were taller.  Then they wouldn't have gotten hurt.

All these QB's were not slammed backwards like Tua was. Big difference and not comparable. Try again.

[Mr. Scot]

29 minutes ago, stan786 said:

Would that not be baked into the data, if all size players get a similar rate of certain types injuries but small players take other injuries more due to physicality you should see a bump in small players getting injured comparatively because you are adding an injury risk on top of an already assumed one.

Didn't look like it from what I read.

[poundaway]

Apparently the guys who did this study showing smaller players get hurt less,  were Bryce Young fans back in 2019.

 

 

[Mr. Scot]

22 minutes ago, frankw said:

Reading through most of this thread the conclusion is people will decide the significance of the size concerns based on how much they like him. Those who love him see little to no issue at all. While those who want to assess the risk level for him long term as a prospect given our steep investment are more apprehensive.

I think he's phenomenal. Hell, he's got all the qualities I love in a quarterback.

Sadly, I'm also very concerned about his durability because of his frame.

That's why I prefer Stroud.

[Ivory Panther]

Steve smith has made his choice it seems!