Injuries, injuries, yea though I walk...
Imagine you have control of an NFL team. Imagine after some years in which your team was not competitive that all of a sudden you think you've got the makings of a side that could even squeak out a wild card berth to the playoffs. Imagine your devout, oh-so-loyal fans are finally starting to build up expectations. Imagine that your best player gets injured and will be out for the season after playing in the first meaningless preseason game.
Ugh!
This is the situation in Cleveland after star LB Jamir Miller was pronounced done for the year following the scrimmage with the Vikings on Saturday. Every year I wonder why the NFL clubs consent to playing their starters at all in preseason since invariably some of them suffer season-ending (or career-ending) misfortune.
Of course, one reason why the NFL is such a great sport is that it truly is a team game, and you need a complete group of players to have much chance of winning. So Cleveland will bravely shrug off the news and carry on, patching together a replacement suite of players.
Sometimes it is all for the best as the St. Louis Rams can attest: Trent Green went down in preseason in 1999, and his replacement Kurt Warner turned out to be the best QB (and arguably player) in football, leading them to one Super Bowl win and what should have been another last year.
Oddly enough in the first persian gulf war there were news stories saying that the number of soldiers who died during the operation was less than would be expected for an equivalent civilian population! There were also some stories of soldiers coming home from the war unhurt, only to be felled in the safe confines of their U.S. land. Maybe the same would hold true for the NFL: not playing your starters would lead to more injuries than actually playing them.
Anyway, at this point you are probably thinking "Tim is rambling on again, time to go do another internet search for Anna Kournikova pictures" but stay with me. The problem for those among us who like to handicap football games (statistically 87% of Tim's reading audience) is that injuries are frequent in the NFL. As far as I know there has never been a published study of the significance of injuries to the wagering dollar, yours and mine. Up until now.
Some of the moles at TwoMinuteWarning.com have been shifting the numbers around down in their cave and are apparently close to announcing the E=mc squared injury data formulas they have concocted. Interesting, very interesting.
It occurs to me that there is no formula that could be all that great since surely, surely it's a virtual case by case basis. I mean if you have a situation like the 49ers used to where your starting QB is all time great Joe Montana and your back up QB is hall of famer Steve Young, does it make much difference if one is out for a given week. On the other hand if Brett Favre goes out (ha ha, what a jest, Brett Favre missing a game, ha ha) it would surely, surely be much more painful for the Packers, as they do not even have a backup QB on their roster as far as I know (usually the coach's son gets the job).
The other problem is that presumably teams differ in how they rate injuries. A "probable" one place may be the same as a "questionable" another. So even if you could equate a player's being out with x points, how can you determine in advance what the effect is when there is no consistency in who plays and who doesn't?
Yet, the TMW guys have done some ash-tonishing stuff in the past, so let's withhold judgement until we see the report.
I hear the sequel is already in the works: The return of the doubtful kicker
