It's like they think each and every injury to (insert key player here) is somehow unique and horrible in a way that no other team in the league can understand.
Oh, woe is us!
The excuse making is convenient for fans who choose to be delusional, or coaches who don't mind something to shift the blame on. But it's pure crap.
It's the NFL, everyone's hurt. Everyone's "banged up."
And yet, I have always wondered why nobody has come up with a decent "injury index" based on "starter games lost?"
Surely, with the absurd and complicated BCS formulas in use, some good stat nerd could whip up a nice easy shorthand statistic we can throw around to compare JUST HOW injured every team is in the NFL, at certain points of the season.
Pro Football Weekly has an annual "Injury Report", which I think is excellent.
While it may be a rather "dry" read, when you breeze through it, you realize that your own team's injury woes may well be mild in comparison to other teams.
And then there are teams like the Bears, who lose their starting QB and starting RB within two weeks of each other. That, in theory shouldn't be a death blow, but only the very lucky, or deep, teams don't start taking on water quickly when that occurs.
Or how about Kansas City? Todd Haley is - to my eye, at least - an arrogant jackass of a coach who has never won anything. But he DID go to the playoffs last year, if that matter to anybody. So he's not exactly "incompetent."
But Haley this year lost his QB, his stud RB, his best TE, and his young stud S.
And he got fired.
Which I know, was reportedly due to personality conflicts with boss Scott Pioli. But really. Where was he going to go, with those losses to IR? The playoffs?
Of course, with Romeo Crennel now in charge, babysitting until the season is done, and with the improbable win over the Packers, guess what?
The Chiefs are NOT YET eliminated!
So I suppose I should tell them, what everyone should tell everyone else: "Shut up about your injuries, and just play."
Bottom line is the Packers were the single most injury burdened team last year and won the super bowl anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe difference is in what you have kept as backups, and the quality of those backups. The Packers did a very good job of having the right combination of backups that matched to the position of the injuries. Now the Packers have lost O linemen and I doubt they have the backups to step up. Unless of course they will bring back Tauscher. :-)
ReplyDeleteSigned,
Mark Tauscher