Offseason quiz followup: Paul Richardson was not as injury prone as fans believe

So far this offseason I’ve started to look at the expectations fans should have regarding the draft, we’ve looked at what plagued Eddie Lacy in the running game in 2017 and I’ve conducted a handful of polls on certain topics to ascertain how correctly fans understand certain topics. One of those polls was on former Seattle Seahawks, but now Washington Redskins, wide receiver Paul Richardson. Namely, I wanted to see just how injury prone fans thought he was because I kept seeing comments that seemed to exaggerate his injury history and availability.

Well, today we’ll take a quick look at the answers fans gave and then compare those to the correct answers. The first question was regarding how much his time in Seattle Richardson was unavailable due to injury. Here’s how fans responded to the poll.

The correct answer was 25%. During his four seasons in Seattle Richardson would have been on the roster for 64 games, and he appeared in 47 games in that timeframe. In addition, he was also a healthy scratch for the Week 6 loss to the Dallas Cowboys in his rookie season of 2014.

The next question looked at Richardson’s injury history excluding his 2015 season.

As I’ve noted in the previous answer, Richardson appeared in 47 games during his time in Seattle, yet only appeared in one game during his injury plagued 2015 season. That means between 2014, 2016 and 2017 Richardson appeared in 46 of 48 games the Seahawks played. Add in the healthy scratch in Week 6 of his rookie season, and he was available for 47 of 48 career regular season games.

The only game Richardson missed due to injury during those three seasons was the Week 13 win over Carolina in 2016, when was inactive due to a hamstring injury. Thus, since he was healthy for 47 of 48 games, the one game he missed due to injury means he missed only 2.08% of regular season games during those three seasons.

Moving on to the final question in the poll I asked about how many games Richardson spent on injured reserve during his time with the Hawks.

With only 64 regular season games in his Seahawks career, and having appeared in 47 games, that leaves 17 as the largest possible number of games he could have spent on injured reserve. So, the answer could be either 7 or 17. However, since he was a healthy scratch for one game, that means he could not have spent more than 16 games in his career on IR. Thus, the correct answer is 7.

Now, this is a detail oriented question because most fans will want to know how he could only spend seven games in his entire career on IR despite missing nearly the entire season. The answer is that Richardson spent the first eight games on the physically unable to perform (PUP) list, injured his hamstring on one of the six snaps that he played and then promptly landed on IR.

However, even the answer seven is technically incorrect, it’s simply the most correct answer. The reason it’s technically incorrect is because while Richardson injured the hamstring that landed him on IR in the Week 10 loss to the Arizona Cardinals, he was not placed on IR until December 5, 2015 before the Week 13 game against the Minnesota Vikings. That means the only time during the regular season that Richardson spent on IR during the entirety of his entire Seahawks career was Weeks 13 through Weeks 17 of 2015, or five weeks.

Regardless of the actual specific number of games Richardson spent on IR, the point is that Richardson was far less injury prone than many fans seem to give him credit for. The reason I bring this up now is that with the draft coming up in just a matter of weeks, there is going to be a lot of debate about replacing several players. Many of those players may have displayed injury issues during their careers, and I just want everyone to be aware that if they bring a bad hot taek regarding a player’s injury history that I will spare no mercy in relentlessly mocking that commenter. (Author’s note: I expect nothing different in return from commenters if when I bring my own bad taeks to the table.)