More Games, More Injuries
by abender20 on Jun 2, 2009 8:45 AM PDT
in Seahawks News & Rumors
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PrintIf you've paid any attention to general NFL news lately, you know that there are more than a handful of parties pushing for an 18 game NFL schedule. To that end, the NFL even produced a study showing that injury rates don't rise toward the end of the season. However, Bill Barnwell at Football Outsiders ran the data himself and discovered that injury rates do in fact rise as the season progresses. This piece has already been discussed over at Advanced NFL Stats, so I leave you to read the study.
So then a topic for some FG discussion: Understanding that players are at a higher risk of injury with each additional game played and that the playoffs are at the end of the season, what are the positives and negatives of swapping two preseason games for two regular season games?
I'll start this off with one point from the positive pole: The 2008 New England Patriots. More information with which to determine the teams worthy of making the playoffs. For every additional games in the NFL schedule, the NFL wheat has a chance to distinguish itself from the NFL chaff. For teams like last year's Patriots, that's a pretty big deal. For every team that finished 8-8 or 9-7, that's two more data points with which to work. For the Lions...
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Here's my take:
The regular season is played so we can determine who the best teams are that season before we have a playoff format. Is 16 games enough for that? Probably, but even if it weren’t, 18 games wouldn’t make anyone that much more confident in the fact that the best teams were in fact playing in the playoffs. The injury concern is a bit of a concern, but not a huge one, since I think each game has a marginally less chance of injury. Just playing football causes concern for injury, every additional game doesn’t add that much more concern. Look at college football with roughly 12 games and it still a large amount of injuries.
Of course when it comes down to it, it’s all about money. Haven’t you ever been watching preseason and wondered “Gee, I wish this game mattered, and I wish I were watching Matty instead of Charlie”? Of course. Or if they extend it at the end of the season, even better, because after the Superbowl and before March Madness, things are kind of boring. It’s still two weeks from the Pac-10 (or whatever conference you root for)’s tournament, no one cares about the pro bowl, and those that care about the NBA and hockey acknowledge that those games can be boring (about the 100 game mark in baseball I believe?).
Like pretty much every issue I think about, I see the positives and the negatives of it, and am pretty indifferent either way. Two more games? Great. Keep it the same? Great. Just get this damn season started already, I want to see what a healthy Branch, Burleson, and the newly acquired Houshmandzadeh can do.
The additional injury risk of two more games isn't worth dismissing entirely (the point of Barnwell's piece, afterall).
I’m not really bothered by boring pre-season games. Teams need the time to work on various stuff, audition players, and build some familiarity. Baseball has spring training and the NBA has preseason games too. What bothers me the most is that the owners are willing to get rid of preseason games but only if they can trade them in for bigger revenue sources.
Yeah, but what's the point of spring training?
Pitchers just work on their pitches and location. If some guy like Tuiasasopo or Mike Morse hits .450 with 5 hrs and still doesn’t get a chance of playing time, and was just facing guys he’d face in AAA anyways, does it really matter?
As for the revenue aspect, owners can do whatever they want in regards to that in my opinion. Only a bad businessman would see an opportunity to increase revenue by 5% (especially in this economy) and not take it.
I’d say the most objective way to look at it would be this. If there were a whole new league or if the NFL never existed, would you have an 18 game season with 2 preseason games? Or would you have 4 preseason games with 16 games (ignoring statistics and ‘tradition’). As an owner, I’d say 18 games of course.
Spring training is important so that players CAN work on what they need to work on to get ready for the season.
The fact that the stats are meaningless and the results are useless is the whole reason ST has value.
Yes, but can't they work on these pitches without games?
I know game simulations are a bit ‘more important’, but it’s not as if you can’t work on your slider by yourself or with a coach.
It’s great that Tui gets some ABs against a Roy Halladay-type, but he’s also getting ABs against Garrett Olson, which he can do in AAA anyways, or just in spring training practice.
No, because nothing can accurately replace
a game situation. Especially playing against other teams, playing against players you don’t know. That’s the only way for a pitcher to really know if they’ve made progress on their pitch.
but the owners still get money from preseason games and they dont have to pay the players
so its probably cheaper to have more preseason games
Ad rates trump all
It’s the broadcasting licenses. If they made more money on preseason games they wouldn’t be clamoring to cut two of them.
With regards to the injury concern,
with statistics problems, I think it’s best to look at the extremes. What’s the chance of injury after 0 games (I suppose it actually isn’t 0% what with all the sneezing and picking up of suitcases that are going on, or knife-stabbing girl friends). What’s the chance of injury after 100 games? Now look at the middle or more acceptable level. 16 games vs. 18 games isn’t a very big gap. It’s like changing the blood alcohol level for driving from .08 to .10. Would there be more accidents at night? Probably. Would it be very noticeable? Depends on your tolerance for crashes/injury. Same for speed limit of 65 mph vs. 60 mph, etc.
I guess a more applicable example would be
if the WBC changed the pitch limit from 70 to 85 pitches. Higher chance of injury? Sure. Cause for concern? Debatable.
It all depends on how much bad baseball you want to see at the beginning of the season
and bad football. Nothing substitutes for real game experience, the toll it takes on the body, and also getting your durability up to speed. That’s why in the last preseason game the starters typically play into the third quarter. This could just as easily occur at the second preseason game, so there is a point there unless you remove preseason altogether. Then you’re going to see some very sloppy first couple of games.
Injuries, unlike speed limits or blood alcohol level, increases exponentially over time. It’s not a matter of 60 or 65 mph it’s a mater of how many miles. Can you drive 16 hours straight? What if you could but then had to drive 2 more hours? Those last two might be a killer. Or they might not. The fact is we don’t know when the limit is and finding out isn’t easy. You’d have to play all year round and check the injury rates.
by B.B.Finnegan on Jun 2, 2009 10:55 AM PDT up reply actions
Actually come to think of it none of our analogies are all that dead on
Since the pitching limit and 2 hour extra drive are move equivalent to overtime games. Maybe it’s more like an engine, putting on 18,000 miles a year vs 16,000? Or stretching out the times between oil changes? I don’t know, I got nothin.
by B.B.Finnegan on Jun 2, 2009 11:32 AM PDT up reply actions
I think I'm pretty much against it
Though not fanatically, i could be swayed with the right argument. It just seems like the main motivation is for the league to make more money, not for the players, the teams, or the fans. I don’t see any other benefit.
I’m also somewhat against taking away two preseason games for two regular. It’s not a fair trade. In preseason someone like Hasselbeck will only play one full game, and in spurts, and not nearly as intense. It’s not the same as two full speed games. Plus the preseason is for evaluating young talent who may never get the chance to prove themselves otherwise. Unless the league considers more injuries and thus more young talent being thrown in there as counting. Or why have preseason at all, perhaps the league wants to move to the college system and have no preseason at all, and then maybe we can introduce the BCS to find out who should really be in the playoffs (cough cough).
It also makes it even more tougher for a team who makes the playoffs and has to play 3-4 extra games. And lessens the chance of star players playing in the Super Bowl, although I don’t see that as a drastic change. By then, players may also be coming back from injuries that occurred at the beginning of the season.
And I’m not sure if it does weed out the teams worthy of making the playoffs. To some degree, perhaps, but it may also be more of a measure on which team lucked out the most with injuries (Arizona).
College does have a preseason for the teams in BCS conferences.
For instance, Northwestern begins this season by playing Towson and Eastern Michigan. Texas plays ULM and Wyoming. Michigan plays Western Michigan to open the season.
but all those games count
like App State beating Michigan in the Big House. Easy games aren’t the same as preseason games. If they were, what would happen to the Raiders and Lions?
It only counts if they miraculously implode and lose
If they win, in the eyes of the BCS, it won’t even count a fraction of a fraction of a point
by B.B.Finnegan on Jun 2, 2009 11:01 AM PDT up reply actions
I'd love to see it
…just because I loves me some football and I’d rather watch a real game than a preseason. I’d even be down for keeping four preseason and just adding two more games. The only way I think the NFL could get the players’ union to agree to it would be to give each team another bye week.
In football as we have discussed, each game is worth so much.
Adding two more would not diminish each game that much, but would make it seem like the truly better teams would make it.
I could go either way. Two more opponents to see the Seahawks play, and real football starting that much earlier? Tough to be that against it.
How about this for a great way to have the league make more money
Let’s have a regular 16 game season to figure out playoff seeding only, and then allow all 32 teams into the playoffs! That way even Detroit gets to earn revenue on a fancy shmancy playoff game. Imagine all the money a whole extra playoff game would add? It would also technically add one game to the schedule, which, if the league wanted, could play this new first playoff games overseas to corner the untapped NFL market in, say, Siberia for instance. Or Zimbabwe. It’d be great for all the fans too, imagine every year getting to see your favorite team in the playoffs?! Of course the drawback might be having to travel to Siberia, but hey, wouldn’t a small sacrifice like that be worth it?
We need every round of the playoffs to be a best of 3 format
Forget this one and done nonsense!!!
:P
The demise of the Broncos in '09 is our future. Pray hard.
Does anyone care about the impact on single-season and career records like yards and tds etc?
Of course, the NFL hasn’t always been a 16 game season either, so we’d just go through another adjustment.
If it were baseball, I'd care a little more,
but I think people get too obsessed with statistics for the sake of having records. Statistics aren’t for records, they’re their to measure value and production. 2000 yards rushing is great, but it’s not as if 1800 yards rushing is much different (given a different system or o-line).
Football records aren’t that important anyways. People wouldn’t care as much if the passing record for TDs or passing yards were broken (as evidenced by the past two years) and the little fanfare (compared to the HR record). You can always adjust things on a per game basis anyways.
Certain career marks probably wouldn't change much either.
Especially RB records. RB’s clearly wear down pretty quickly as it is, adding two games a season per year will probably knock a full season off a RB’s career.
I do
Not because I care about the records, but because I care about the context in which accomplishment is judged.
I am pretty much against it. I value the benefit that preseason games have on the team, on the players, on the bubble players in particular. I don’t want to water down the significance of each game, I don’t want to subject the players to, or be subjected to, increased injury. I don’t want champions to be built upon withstanding attrition, but upon superior execution. I think 16 games for 32 team across 8 divisions provides a symmetry that would be a shame to lose if it weren’t for a good reason.
To the owners, the bump up in turnstile hits from preseason games to regular season games is a good enough reason. Without having a vested interest, there, I don’t care about the money, only about the quality of the game. I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue at all that quality of the game, the games, the season, won’t be diminished. More is not more.
It probably happens, and eventually we’ll all get used to it, and eventually the most senile of us will quit complaining about it. But that won’t mean it was a right decision, or that quality wasn’t diminished.
The reason why I am against it is because financially it is ignorant of the current situation and is bad business.
If you take a team from a smaller market and ask its season ticket holders to pay more, they are going to lose seats. Adding two regular season games is about giving the owners the ability to raise ticket prices. That will cause more strain on markets like ours than it would say on Washington’s. But the fact that NY Giants have gone through their 160k waiting list and are short of about 4000 premium seat season ticket packages meaning that the large markets are suffering too. Business wise it is a dumb decision especially in this economic climate. If you watch baseball now, the seats behind homeplate seem vacant because the corporate seating is no longer considered a necessary expense. I think what we are seeing are a bunch of men who think demand is going to stay high and try to see if they can squeeze profit but what is going to happen is major shortfalls. I hope for the NFL, they scrap those plans.
Season ticket holders
Pay for the preseason games at full price. So shifting 2 preseason games to regular season wouldn’t change season ticket holders’ costs one bit.
The thought is that they are paying a flat price per game, thus the preseason games and regular season tickets have a weighted average.
With two more regular season games, they will need to re-average out the costs. That is part of the revenue plan. This is how they think. Unfortunately it is naive and assumes the consumer will bite their tongue and accept.
People are paying a lot of money for season tickets already
and they obviously enjoy football. I’m not sure they’re going to suddenly balk at an extra $100 or so when they’ll be getting a couple extra games for it.
OK, I finally read the article, and I have some doubts about it.
A bad team is more likely to put a guy on IR or not play a guy for something that has been nagging him all season. Look how many lineman we had injured at the end of last year, if we were 8-4, would some of them have played? Probably.
I wonder what the injury rates were like when the NFL switched from 14 to 16 games. Obviously the time difference would be a major factor, but how about a study of the few years prior and after to the the schedule change?
No change. 16 games is enough.
I like the “idea” of sixteen games. It’s a nice number that fits thematically with the league of 32 teams, two conferences, four divisions with four teams each. You can easily tell when the season’s at the halfway mark for your team, and even the quarter-mark.
Eighteen is such an awkward number, comparably.
Great, buncha math nerds here.
Make me feel dumb, why don’t you.
Because math confuses and angers me!
"Part, fools!
Put up your swords. You know not what you do."
by Fearless Frog on Jun 2, 2009 12:44 PM PDT up reply actions
Preseason Injuries
Are there not quite a few injuries in the preseason..? Rookie players simply pushing too hard, trying to make the rosters…? And there are also quite a few injuries when NFL players “welcome” Rookies onto the next level… If they do end up implementing this change the biggest additional adjustment would have to be to expand the rosters… The late rounds of the draft have shown what can happen if you cultivate the talent that exists out there… More players training at the NFL level will lead to more discovery of hidden talents… Many players snubbed by the draft have the Fire to prove scouts wrong… Absent the European League the NFL needs more internal development… Expand the rosters… I’ll not cry for Paul Allen or Al Davis’s wallets…
I agree, if they want to do this they should expand the rosters
… but that would mean spending more money on player salaries, and defeat the whole purpose.
How can you agree with that?
The first part makes sense. The rest is just a bunch of unrelated thoughts followed by ‘…’ stringed together.
More players training at the NFL level will lead to more discovery of hidden talents… Many players snubbed by the draft have the Fire to prove scouts wrong… Absent the European League the NFL needs more internal development… Expand the rosters… I’ll not cry for Paul Allen or Al Davis’s wallets…
I mean, not to be a total jackass, but what is this?
Hahaha
"Part, fools!
Put up your swords. You know not what you do."
by Fearless Frog on Jun 2, 2009 10:18 PM PDT up reply actions
I think his point was that if you're going to expand the season and expose teams to additional injuries
you’ll need to expand the rosters to make up for those lost players. There are a lot of players out there at least deserving some kind of developmental process that the NFL has never had much of and has bupkis of now that NFL Europe’s been disbanded. If they’re going to expand the season by 2 games so the owners can make an extra buck then there shouldn’t be too much of a problem in signing on 5 or more players making rookie minimums. I know I was surprised that they decided against expanding rosters this off season.
Avoid excessive ellipses and use proper punctuation please.
There’s some good thoughts in there, but it’s a little too stream-of-consciousness to be readable.
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!
If the owners need more profit they should reduce their expenses. Paying $ 100 million for Haynesworth as an example. If anyone has ever played football at a high level they know what it’s like waking up the second day after the game. No matter how good of shape you are in your are stiff and sore, your joints ache, your muscles ache, and you definitely don’t want to pratice that day. So, for the owners to ask the players for two more games they need to be compensated well which would drive the costs up for the fans. As much as I love the games I don’t want the players to play another two a year.
I have a really hard time arguing against extra football
Jesus Christ is the off season long, lets keep 4 pre season games and add an extra two games to the end of the year. Barring the extra two games bringing enough injuries to dilute the game down to an unwatchable state I really don’t see who loses here.
I believe they don't want to move the Superbowl any further back
so they’d have to tack the games on to the beginning of the season. Which honestly, is fine by me. What’s wrong with August football?
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