[msqueri]

A few comments on injuries.



First, injuries are mostly stochastic.  You put enough force at the wrong angle, and even the most resilient players can get injured. Sometimes it is dumb luck: does a cleat catch on something as a lateral force is applied to the knee. Did two hits happen within a fraction of a second, or did the player have time to absorb the first hit before the second came.



That being said, within all the effect of luck, strength and conditioning can play a role. It is well know that underdeveloped hamstrings compared to quads are a risk factor for ACL injuries (mostly in jumping sports like basketball). Generally speaking, stronger players are more likely to be able to resist forces (but also, stronger players generate more force, which can be bad).  Teasing it all out is not easy, especially given my first point.



Notwithstanding specific injuries during Turkey’s tenure, I think my subjective perception of the data (and I am welcome to being proven wrong) is that there have been more players losing more time to injury since he left than when he was here. I remember at one point in time the discussion was about our “injury luck” while he was here.  I’d love to see someone compile the data and test the hupothesis if it is accessible to see if my subjective assessment is merited.



Even if the above is true, establishing a causal link between Turley’s presence and fewer injuries is impossible. We might have just been lucky, and then experienced a reversion to the mean.



All that being said, Sam is right that the other consideration is that the impact of injuries due to critical lack of depth at key positions. “Next man up” only works if the next man up is up to the task.



BC

Testing this hypothesis was one of my top research priorities this off-season but every time I came up with a methodology I liked I realized how much work it would be. If there's a convenient data set out there, or if somebody can use PFF data to count up snaps/games by the preseason expected starters (that part of it would require qualitative grunt work I imagine), I'd be super interested.

For what it's worth, thinking about this impressionistically/subjectively, I'm skeptical of the idea Stanford has been unusually injury-prone. I start from the premise that we know Shaw, for all his many admirable traits, to be a pretty excuse-prone coach. Then I think about all my years watching football and what an incredibly violent, injury-prone sport it is. Then there's the issue that's been discussed in this thread that injuries are much more noticeable when you can't weather them, regardless of whether they're actually occurring with more prevalence. Think about the 2013 season when we lost Henry Anderson and Ben Gardner for big chunks of the season, and how we could weather that compared to what happened when we had some receiver injuries last year.

A big part of how snake-bitten a team feels by injuries depends on other factors. We've talked about the resilience/depth factor. There's also timing, both in terms of when on a schedule injuries happen and whether it coincides with other injuries. In 2019 we had a lot of OL injuries concurrently. Last year WR and DB appeared to be snake-bit (not incidentally, positions that get injured more often than others typically). But does that mean we had a lot of injuries? I'm not sure it does.

[msqueri]

A few comments on injuries.



First, injuries are mostly stochastic.  You put enough force at the wrong angle, and even the most resilient players can get injured. Sometimes it is dumb luck: does a cleat catch on something as a lateral force is applied to the knee. Did two hits happen within a fraction of a second, or did the player have time to absorb the first hit before the second came.



That being said, within all the effect of luck, strength and conditioning can play a role. It is well know that underdeveloped hamstrings compared to quads are a risk factor for ACL injuries (mostly in jumping sports like basketball). Generally speaking, stronger players are more likely to be able to resist forces (but also, stronger players generate more force, which can be bad).  Teasing it all out is not easy, especially given my first point.



Notwithstanding specific injuries during Turkey’s tenure, I think my subjective perception of the data (and I am welcome to being proven wrong) is that there have been more players losing more time to injury since he left than when he was here. I remember at one point in time the discussion was about our “injury luck” while he was here.  I’d love to see someone compile the data and test the hupothesis if it is accessible to see if my subjective assessment is merited.



Even if the above is true, establishing a causal link between Turley’s presence and fewer injuries is impossible. We might have just been lucky, and then experienced a reversion to the mean.



All that being said, Sam is right that the other consideration is that the impact of injuries due to critical lack of depth at key positions. “Next man up” only works if the next man up is up to the task.



BC

Testing this hypothesis was one of my top research priorities this off-season but every time I came up with a methodology I liked I realized how much work it would be. If there's a convenient data set out there, or if somebody can use PFF data to count up snaps/games by the preseason expected starters (that part of it would require qualitative grunt work I imagine), I'd be super interested.

For what it's worth, thinking about this impressionistically/subjectively, I'm skeptical of the idea Stanford has been unusually injury-prone. I start from the premise that we know Shaw, for all his many admirable traits, to be a pretty excuse-prone coach. Then I think about all my years watching football and what an incredibly violent, injury-prone sport it is. Then there's the issue that's been discussed in this thread that injuries are much more noticeable when you can't weather them, regardless of whether they're actually occurring with more prevalence. Think about the 2013 season when we lost Henry Anderson and Ben Gardner for big chunks of the season, and how we could weather that compared to what happened when we had some receiver injuries last year.

A big part of how snake-bitten a team feels by injuries depends on other factors. We've talked about the resilience/depth factor. There's also timing, both in terms of when on a schedule injuries happen and whether it coincides with other injuries. In 2019 we had a lot of OL injuries concurrently. Last year WR and DB appeared to be snake-bit (not incidentally, positions that get injured more often than others typically). But does that mean we had a lot of injuries? I'm not sure it does.