Injuries could be contributor to NFL’s lagging TV ratings
ability to just move on, push it aside.
“I think a lot of us at this level don’t even feel the pain as much. We’re just kind of numb to it as this point.”
Maybe the audience has become just kind of numb to the suffering as well. Yeah, they knew the job was dangerous when they took it. Yeah, they have paychecks that can meet most definitions of obscenity. Yeah, injuries are part of the game, but is there a point out there in galaxy between football and its audience, a nexus much nearer than we think, where injuries are not just part of the game but just too much a part of the game?
The league’s week began in depressingly metronomic fashion with the big reveal — the full extent of the previous weekend’s carnage. Tampa Bay shut down marquee quarterback Jameis Winston due to a shoulder injury, then, Monday night, Green Bay Packers tackle Bryan Bulaga (perhaps you remember him mauling people the last time Pittsburgh visited the Super Bowl) tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, the 33rd torn ACL of an NFL season only half done.
“On grass, too, which is weird,” DeCastro sniffed. “Usually it’s on turf that happens.”
Knees again dominate the league’s destruction inventory. Of the approximately 300 players on injured lists throughout the NFL at the beginning of the week, 94 were there with damaged knees. Ankles are the next most vulnerable body part, followed by shoulders, feet, and hamstrings in that order. In the sprawling compilation maintained by CBS Sports, 63 players have injuries listed as undisclosed, so the actual anatomy standings may vary.
You can’t avoid contemplating a day when we’ll cross the line from where pain was part of the game to where pain is the game, or is that already in the rear view?
I didn’t put that question to Ben Roethlisberger; he just happened to be talking about it in the locker room the other day.
“I hate being asked about sacks and injuries,” the quarterback noted. “Hopefully we stay as injury-free as we can. Injuries are gonna happen, it’s just a matter of who, how significant, how serious, things like that. Typically the team that stays the healthiest usually can make a run in the playoffs.”
That can be verified with a new stat I just invented this week. You’ve heard of baseball’s OPS? Well, this is OFTS, an acronym for Out For The Season. At last check, 128 players were Out For The Season, even if Arizona Cardinals star running back David Johnson now says he hopes to return.
Teams with winning records to this point averaged 3.2 OFTS players so far, while teams with losing records averaged 4.69 OFTS. Seattle’s Super Bowl aspirations took a wallop Thursday night when standout defender Richard Sherman ruptured an Achilles tendon to become the Seahawks fourth player to go OFTS. That’s what Ben is saying, essentially, but what he’s not saying specifically is that “teams that can make a run,” tend to be the teams with the healthy quarterbacks, a requirement that has already eliminated 12 teams, nearly 40 percent of the league.
If the playoffs started today (we’ll all have missed Christmas, I know), 10 of the 12 teams would feature starting quarterbacks who were available for every game, and all would have had their primary passer available for at least six games.
The Steelers are 6-2 in no small part because Ben is one of them, and that they’ve faced a rookie quarterback, two back-ups, and this week at Indy, a backup’s backup. And no smaller part of their success stems from Baltimore’s AFC-leading OFTS number. The Ravens lost nine players for the season before the season even started. The official figure is eight, but that doesn’t count guard John Urschel, who retired July 28 because, as a doctoral candidate in applied mathematics, he figured his own capacious brain wasn’t worth the risk. Good for Pittsburgh, but bad for a league without megawatt stars Aaron Rodgers, Deshaun Watson, Carson Palmer, Andrew Luck, and prominent non-throwers like Sherman, Johnson, Odell Beckham, Julian Edelman, J.J. Watt, Greg Olsen, Tyler