In reply to: actually, it is a third thing posted by ACross
Playing slugfest after slugfest is not good for player health or the longevity of careers with 13 - 14 game seasons and what we've learned about brain trauma.
Ideally, one of the middle tier games this season - Louisville, Virginia, or BC - would be a bit better and somewhere outside the ACC (Big Ten or Big XII, probably - say Oklahoma State or Iowa or someone like that), but otherwise, this year is almost exactly how we should schedule.
I'm open to just about anything reasonably calculated to ensure the health of players, particularly with respect to brain trauma and injuries, including abolition of the sport if less drastic steps are unavailing.
However, we've been on this scheduling trajectory for a longer period of time than brain injuries have been in the public discourse.
If you want to claim that this pussified home schedule is an intentional action of human compassion from the same man who swallowed his tongue when Torii Hunter's near-decapitation went unaddressed by on-field officials, replay officials and the Big XII office, I'm going to have to disagree.
Now, maybe scaling back to an 11 game schedule and no conference championship games.
to scale back the season, then we should lead the charge. Given how much money is at stake for both the universities and conferences with the extra games and conference championships, that proposal is DOA. The SEC and Big Ten, in particular, would tell us to go shit in a hat.
Unless and until that changes, I have no issue with a game or two each year against Bowling Green or whomever.
Doesn’t lessen the impact of subconcusive hits that lead to brain trauma.
You don’t actually think that do you?
Playing 20 - 40% fewer snaps over the course of a season will, though.
a game against Bowling Green is safer than a game against an opponent worth watching. Bet you can't back up such a contention.
The likelihood of injury is directly correlated with snap count over the course of a season. That should be pretty obvious, but linked is an analysis Football Outsiders did on just that.
Games against Bowling Green and the like both have fewer snaps - as the dominant teams spend the second half running out the clock - and a much more even distribution of snaps over the roster.
If your starting 22 are playing 50+ snaps every single week, then that's shit for the health of your team.
it doesn't seem to be much support for what I asked you to back up.
You replied with NFL data. But you didn't supply any information that correlates college football to the NFL.
You state "The likelihood of injury is directly correlated with snap count over the course of a season." Yet your link states:
"We hypothesized above that injury risk increases over the course of a season. Figure 3, however, shows that the risk of a new injury is roughly flat across all weeks, particularly late in the season."
That might not be exactly what you stated, however, what you stated, again, begs the question. Can you support "The likelihood of injury is directly correlated with snap count over the course of a season."?
Last, you'd need to support playing Bowling Green would lead to fewer plays in the game. Can you support that as a claim as well? One of the premises of the "in today's game you have to play a weaker schedule" is that power teams would need to blowout weaker teams (obviously not Kelly's forte). So it seems your argument might be coming out of both sides of your mouth. We'd blow out weaker teams, so we'd have fewer plays. Yet, we'd have to blow out weaker teams in order for the committee not to ding us for our weak schedule. So is it not possible we might execute more plays in order to land a blowout against a weak team? If you have a long list of games where Kelly blew out weak opposition by halftime, and we played our scrubs all second half, please share that data as well.
Do our games against The University of Navy have the fewest plays per game for us, year-in, year-out? Do we always have the fewest injuries against Navy, year-in, year-out? Probably not a fair example, as we haven't had a coach in 20 years who understands how to play Navy.
Not really wanting to be argumentative, just don't agree with some of the premises in this thread and probably won't unless they get supported.
all of football. I don't know what to tell you. I'll be frank and tell you that you're reading the statistics the wrong way - if the average player has a 0.1% chance of being injured on every snap, then his chance of not being injured in a game is (1-0.001)^#SNAPS. His chance of not being injured over the course of the season are Y% given X%. Why is the aggregate injury rate going upwards all season? Furthermore, the risk of injury is the same snap to snap and game to game, but the cumulative injury risk is higher. If I roll a dice 100 times, I don't expect it to come up on 6 50% of the time. College football isn't different than pro in this matter, and the only real difference is that the #snaps per game doesn't vary much in the pros because of small rosters (hence almost no variation game to game).
This is all disregarding Kelly or the particulars of ND's coaching. This is college-football wide. It is obvious that the starting 22 gets fewer snaps in blow outs than it does in semi-struggles against decent Tier 2 opponents (take Northwestern last year as a good example).
Navy is something of a special exception, but even then, we haven't had a lot of injuries against them in at least five years or so.
Also, I would assume there is an injury correlation with volume of plays. If you have the starters playing 45 -60 plays each and the backups playing 30-45 it would seem that it would be safer than having Starters play 70-100 plays
This is all a hypothesis. Also, one would think less injuri a occur playing a tr with MAC level S&C program as opposed to Top 25 S&C programs
that allowed what you describe?
That Ball State game was so bad that it, coupled with the Vanderbilt doozie, prompted a QB switch from a starter with a 12-3 record