Another season gets underway and there are bound to surprises in how various teams fare.  However, is seems that there are always certain factors that figure into to the fortunes of those teams that exceed or fail our expectations.  Most often, the contributing factor seems to be random injury.

 

However, injuries are sometimes not quite as random as they may seem.  No, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory; big men running into each other at high-speed, with bad intent, play football and some injuries are inevitable.

 

Proper technique and training are essential.  That helps reduce injuries but there are forces working equally as hard that increase the incidence of injury.  Players are getting bigger and faster and, as any physics teacher can tell you, which means more energy is released in these collisions.

 

Playing the Game

 

To play football is to play in pain.  Every player starts to hurt in training camp and continues to hurt until sometime after the season is finished.  If they are lucky, it is general soreness and bruising, but it all takes its toll.  Often little injuries lead to big ones, a player is a little slower or favoring a bad ankle and they get hurt worse because their timing is off.

 

There are specific circumstances in the game that are particularly dangerous.  Because the angles of attack are greatly multiplied, kickoffs and punt returns fall into this category; blocks can come from almost any direction.  For a player on special teams the requirement is to keep track of where the ball is, maintain discipline, and keep aware of every player in your area.  By the way, you have less than five seconds to make the play.

 

Broken plays have much the same issues but worse.  When a play is run, both the offense and the defense have a basic idea of what is about to happen and respond accordingly.  Sometimes what happens is substantially different though and suddenly the play turns into something else altogether.  In some instances, the play reverses flow entirely and a player can get hopelessly turned around and end up being blindsided.

 

Actually though the worse situation often happens on turnovers.  They can happen very suddenly with little or no warning.  The real problem here is the sudden reversal of roles, tacklers suddenly become blockers and vice versa.  Again the flow of the play often changes radically as well leaving players out of position to defend themselves.

 

There are also some players, and even some teams, from time to time that get a reputation for dirty play.  This is play intended to injure their opponents but though it is talked about, it is actually not very common.  From a team stand point the promotion of this type of play is suicidal, it would quickly become known and players on that team would be targeted for retribution.

 

Much the same thing is true from the individual level.  Of course, that does not stop players from having individual grudges nor does it stop emotional outbursts like Albert Haynesworth’s action last season against Andre Gurode last season.  (Haynesworth stomped on Gurode’s head in the Dallas game last season.)  Which brings another factor to bear, the NFL will come down hard on a player who acts with the clear intent to injure another.

 

Most of what happens on the field that ends up getting someone hurt is either due to a succession of minor injuries or poor technical execution.  Poor tackling technique is rampant in the league; leading with the helmet is a good way for a player to cripple someone, usually himself.  Players get out of position and or fail to get to where they were supposed to be and get rolled up on.

 

The Coaching Element

 

Position coaches do not get nearly the credit that they are due.  They are the teachers of skills and the best protection players have against getting or causing injury is the use of proper technique.  The speed in the NFL is so great that mistiming is a major risk; the right thing done at the wrong time is just as dangerous as the wrong thing.

 

Players coming into the NFL, no matter what their background, have to spend time refining their technique.  In many cases, they have to be re-taught, to unlearn methods that they could get by with at lower levels because they were that much better than their counterparts were.  These skills are often positionally specific though, to the loss of basic tackling and blocking skills, which are those most commonly related to injuries.

 

The lack of fundamentals in professional football has a direct relationship to injuries.  Players too often are looking for big plays and ending up mistiming what should have been easy plays.  Players leading with their helmet or shoulder seem to take out their teammates with much greater frequency than they actually produce a positive result for their own side.  It is much better for the second player in on a tackle to try to strip the ball as opposed going for a hit anyway.

 

The strength and conditioning coach is a more recent coaching staff position.  The role of these coaches has come to include other aspects of player well-being like diet and nutrition.  It is unrelated to any positionally specific techniques but conditioning has a lot to do with preventing injury and even implications for recovery.  Formerly these coaches simply haunted the weight rooms but they have seen an expanded role over the past couple of decades.  They are often involved with the training staff and the services they provide have expanded greatly.

 

This has become pretty much a full time position, working with players year round.  Still there are players who do not avail themselves of these services.  In the past though, before this type of coaching was readily available the best players often seemed to do this work on their own (Walter Payton, Jerry Rice).  Institutionally though this type of service has helped improve the overall conditioning of the average player.

 

There is a down side however, as the football workouts of Payton and Rice would not be what is normal for today’s players.  Size and speed are important commodities for a NFL player and today’s workouts are much more oriented toward speed, bulk, and strength as opposed to endurance.  This varies somewhat depending upon position but fewer reps and more weight has become the trend.  This also allows players to gain and maintain more weight but it less effective in making players resilient.

 

The same trend exists in the type of running done.  Gone are the days when linemen had to run a sub six-minute mile.  Not that they could not now but the need to maintain weight argues against that kind of exercise.  The cost is that they are not as well trained for stamina.

 

Observations

 

Of course, the increase in the bulk and speed of players contributes to injuries.  It is not simply the physics of the added momentum on the impact at collision though that is the problem.  In many cases it appears that, player’s bodies have exceeded their engineered capacity.  Many players carry very high weights for their frames.  There are practical limits in what ligaments, sinew, muscle, and bone can structurally withstand.  The result can be like a spring wound too tight, that energy has to go somewhere and sometimes it works against itself.

 

Actually the increasing of the bulk of NFL players, the heavy weights and low reps, have much more serious, potentially fatal, ramifications.  The toll is taken after players can no longer play in terms joint and general physical costs.  There have been studies of retired NFL linemen show that more than half suffer from risk factors for heart disease and are much more likely to have enlarged hearts than other former players who played other positions.  But the price is also taken among active players; the same condition was involved in Corey Stringer’s death and claims victims at various levels of the game every season.

 

Dale “at” footballforecasters.com