Sports Injury Predictor has partnered with Rotoworld in 2015 to give you an even greater chance winning your league this coming season. As a quick introduction we have an algorithm that figures out which players are more likely to get injured in the coming season. We’re going to isolate some of the more risky high value players as well as point out who the safer players are as we help you ramp up your research for your upcoming drafts. Follow us on Twitter @injurypredictor and check out our injury search engine here for the complete injury history for every player in the NFL.
A quick word about what this article is not about. We’re not giving you reasons to whiff on Le’Veon Bell in 2015. Clearly he is a beast who is going to be one of the next great running backs of our time. The days of Peterson, Charles, Foster and Lynch will be drawing to a close in the next 2-3 years and at the tender age of 23 Bell leads the pack of up and coming elite ready to take the mantle of fantasy’s most prized position.
Discussing the floor of players never evokes a good feeling. The floor conversation is ultimately about what will happen if things go bad and do not turn out as planned. This is far removed from the electric feeling that you get when you start thinking about a players upside with the kind of role and volume a young back like Bell has lined up.
But you wouldn’t buy a car without the Carfax right?
Discussing players’ downside will help you make intelligent decisions with those high draft picks. And that is what this article is about. It’s about not looking away from something that is not in line with where everyone else is focused on and talking about. It’s about adding a layer of vision that will help you make a better decision whether you decide to draft him or not.
This discussion is no different to what we advised on Julio Jones in 2014. A player with enormous potential but with huge injury risk dangling over him. If you did have him on your fantasy team in 2014 there is a good chance that his 1,593 yards did not help you. Why? Not because he missed one game with a hip pointer in week 15. Rather it was because he had a 6 week stretch from week 6 – 12 where he went over 70 yards only once and scored only one touchdown. The reason for that was an ankle injury that he was nursing that slowed him down. Jones produced 38% of those 1,593 yards in 3 games, 2 of which were in the playoffs. So he didn’t miss a lot of games but he played hurt and it sapped it him of that difference-making ability during the season.
Bell has a high risk for injury this year. Very high. It’s based on the following factors:
o Experience in the NFL
o Workload
o Previous injuries
Experience in the NFL
Bell is going into his third year. Players within the first 3 years of playing are much more likely to get injured than players who are more experienced (more on that here).
Bell is a young running back and as such is at a higher risk than the more experienced running backs in the league.
Workload
In last week’s article we discussed the workload myth here but in case you missed it we’re not referring to Bell’s 2014 workload. We have exhaustively tested this and found that the relationship between injury and a player’s previous workload is a myth that has no predictive quality when attempting to forecast injury.
Regardless of the site you choose to follow for projections Bell is in for a monster workload. Without a number two back to chisel into his workload it is all there for the taking. However with this projected workload comes increased risk. Statistically speaking the more times he touches the ball the closer he gets to an injury.
The defense most people will counter with is that his suspension will reduce the amount of exposure to risk due to less games being played. If all things were equal it would be that simple. However we find that most players actually get injured at the start of their season. We picture players as wearing down over time but our data shows that players who are going to get injured do so early (survivor bias).
As you can see in the graph below, last season there were twice as many injuries in September as there were in November and more in the preseason and September than November and December combined.
Bell is exposed to the same risk in his first 8 games that everyone else is.
Previous injuries
In Bell’s first two years his injuries have been significant. He had a Lisfranc sprain that kept him out of the first 3 games in his rookie year along with a huge concussion against the Ravens later on that season.
The knee injury he suffered last year cannot be taken at face value and requires some research. We rely solely on third party, public sourced information to get our injury data. This means that we have to qualify everything that comes our way with objective information as much as possible.
The best objective qualifiers for injury are games missed and whether surgery was required. These are solid indicators of the nature and severity of an injury. We have to qualify everything that comes our way with objective information as much as possible as there is a lot of misinformation and straight up lying that takes place around injury in the NFL.
When Cam Newton underwent his ankle surgery last year the team released information that this was preventative surgery undertaken to tighten his ligaments. Cam would be a better and faster player as a result. As we have hundreds of cases in our database of ankle surgeries it was easy to see through the lie using that bit of info. Cam was not going to be better or faster. We are not yet in an age where players are getting surgeries to give them bionic superpowers just yet. Cam was coming into the 2014 season hurt (we covered that here) regardless of what the team said and that is how it played out.
And so when the injury first happened to Bell it was referred to as a hyperextension of the knee. Hyperextensions do occur reasonably frequently in the NFL as players suffer collisions that cause the knee to bend the wrong way. Players recover from hyperextension injuries pretty quickly and can usually be back on the field within a week or two of resting the knee. Examples of players who have suffered recent knee hyperextensions Julius Thomas (2013 missed two games), A.J. Green (preseason 2013 did not miss any games) and Keenan Allen (2013 did not miss any games).
The dots that don’t connect for this account of the injury are few but important:
o Bell himself has openly said that his knee was worse than what was described back in January
While he did participate fully in OTAs and minicamp and has been hitting the conditioning hard, if this were a mere hyperextension why is he not at 100% yet?
o Why was he not brought out even for a few snaps in the playoff loss to the Ravens? There was no one on the team to back him up and it wasn’t like it was a regular season game. A simple hyperextension would most likely have resulted in him picking up some opportunity in a game of that importance.
o The hit was low, hard and was as his foot planted on the ground. Most normal humans would be walking like chickens for the rest of their lives. It’s well within the realms of possibility that there was more damage here than originally thought due to the nature of the hit.
So what do we do with this?
The best-case scenario is that this was just a simple hyperextension and Bell is being a little dramatic in his comments about his knee still not being 100%. The most likely scenario is that he is dealing with a more severe knee injury such as a posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) tear. The PCL is the ligament at the back of the knee that stabilizes the knee from bending the wrong way. This type of injury occurs when the knee hyperextends severely. Surgery is not always required and players do return to form afterwards. Some notable players who have suffered PCL injuries: Reggie Bush, Felix Jones, Calvin Johnson, Andre Johnson and Brian Hartline.
However, if this is a PCL injury it is more significant than a mere hyperextension because of the raised risk for injuries that are associated with this type of tear namely hamstring, calf and cartilage issues in the knee. With all the murkiness that surrounds this keep a close eye on reports as to how he copes once contact drills begin in training camp at the end of the month.
In conclusion
Our algorithm takes all three factors we have discussed above (experience, workload and previous injuries) into account and produces a probability of the player being injured. Even with the injury being regarded as a hyperextension he still comes in to 2015 with a high risk of injury. If we adjust for a PCL injury that probability goes up even further.
Finally, we are not advising that you avoid him on draft day. No one ever won a fantasy championship by selecting only safe players. What we are saying is that the floor with Bell is potentially lower than what is currently being portrayed even with his 3 game ban taken into account. There is no doubt that he is going to light up the scoreboard and have huge games that will be difference makers, all we’re saying is that if you’re looking for a safe first round selection he is probably not your guy. If you do draft him be sure to build the depth around him using replacement players that can fill in for him in the weeks he may be unavailable.
